TrustRadius
Confluence is a collaboration and content sharing platform used primarily by customers who are already using Atlassian's Jira project tracking product. The product appeals particularly to IT users.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/qW/eX/U73JLJED2UUG.JPEGAssociate DevOps' year long approach at ConfluenceConfluence is the WGU wiki system for documentation across the entire company. It is encouraged as the 1 stop shop for most departments with a few that choose to use SharePoint or Service Now instead. This is a helpful place for meeting notes, collaborate on tutorials and a handy storage for management tool links.,Great support out there since its widely used. Very customizable with themes and color combinations. Collaborative editing options. A plethora of add-ons to customize your experience.,Migrations of data can be difficult. Backup service breaks so you're better off manually backing up. The log-analyzer can sometimes treat symptoms, but may not see the root cause to a problem with the system.,7,Improved documentation gathering. Less siloing between departments on data. 1,800 users capable of collaborating within an internal system.,6,MS SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, JIRA SoftwareStunning project management with ConfluenceAtlassian Confluence provides me a bundle of solutions to my business with great intelligence and working efficiencies. Moreover, the feedback collecting feature of this particular product helps me in taking useful decisions for my company wherever and whatever I want. Furthermore, it helps me in making effective communication with all my working partners that further facilitates me to overcome communication barriers as well.,This effective application has so many useful advantages that create flexibility to edit different types of documents and also to edit all my rich content within just a few seconds with all these amazing features. It has a platform for managing a lot of files even longer files or some tiny pieces of documents. It has a useful feature that surely helps me out in my tough schedule is it’s about to create useful meeting notes that are quite useful in order to get a reminder as well.,By using Atlassian Confluence now I can confidently say that I can manage dozens of files in one single location and also discussion among the teammates is now more convenient with it. Workload issues are so much less by using it so, for me, there is no drawback in it. Because of its superb features and functionalities, it has become my favorite companion now. I do not have to face any kind of trouble.,9,Aligning workspace and also the databases with greater efficiency is nowadays possible with this piece of technology that is readily available for any kind of project. The sharing facility that it provides is none other than a blessing because am able to share a large amount of data through simple steps by using this application. I can work with all my teammates at one certain place without anything disturbing that influences me to move here and there in order to search any file.,Salesforce Community Cloud,10,Highfive, HubSpot CRM, QuickBooks OnlinePowerful tool with no design inspirationAtlassian Confluence usage has grown in our business as a method to capture ideas, build on them and then finalise a decision. The whole team uses it. We also needed a place to capture our reference documents and processes as they are defined. Decide we want Graphic Designers to load mock-ups straight to the Google Drive folder for a customer so sales or design support just does a follow-up email/call? Then edit their "Process Guide" in Confluence.,Load an idea. Never lose it. Everyone can edit the core page or add comments. The old "parking bay" full of post-it notes doesn't get lost at the end of the conference. Templates - lots of different formats that provide suggested processes improvements in their very design. And we edit the pages to suit our company process anyway. Extra tools. Add images, links, Trello board, Jira task links, etc. I found the inbuilt draw.io tool useful the other day when working on a process and now that diagram is added to the proposal document we send customers. Pages can be categorised, so we have an Internal Process pages, Project pages, Team Directory pages, etc.,Atlassian Confluence is not very graphic so the user interface has a lot of options which can be daunting for new users. It feels like an old system - so busy with text options everywhere, I feel like I want to break out in DOS commands and throw away my mouse. Navigation is not always intuitive - I know there is flexibility there, but it can be confusing. Therefore user engagement is not as strong as it could be. I'd love to have tables displaying pages alphabetically with field and filter options. I have customer information but want to see the missing info more easily so I can action these. Or add a customer and it sorts itself in the right order. And then my template for customers can have a field added for all customers. There is a danger that the data can become too static as it doesn't make it easy to see the data. Same forms approach has an application to our other categories,7,I think it does the job of capturing ideas and has had a positive ROI.,,10,JIRA Software, Jira Service Desk, Agile CRMUsing Atlassian Confluence for 2+ years.We use the Atlassian Confluence for ideas, brainstorming, product stories, changelogs, standup meetings, retrospective meetings and to track the production issues... the list goes on. We use it across our whole organization. Previously we use the MS Word and MS Powerpoint for user stories, and that became too difficult to maintain the content.,Built-in tools (drag and drop) to format the page Tagging team members Email notifications for changes,I start watching a few pages, but Confluence then added me in all pages by default and now I am getting a lot of notifications for irrelevant pages Sometimes when my teammate adds some points in a Standup meeting against my work then I only get the empty response in email notifications without the details of what was added. (I don't know why the content is missing),9,Time-saving to gather all content at one place. Notification system saves a lot of time - some times I just go through the notification and get the whole idea of what's going on.,Planio and Microsoft Office 365,8,Slack, JIRA SoftwareSimplicity at its coreConfluence is primarily used in the organization for documentation. Confluence is utilized to access information about our hardware and software solutions in a convenient location. It provides new and old employees the ability to gain information about an area that they may have questions about. It creates an area to provide a more in depth well of knowledge about a particular area or topic that is not documented elsewhere due to a lack of a solid structure.,Quick way to document knowledge. Easy to access and navigate. Provides updates on latest documentation. Customizable. Searchable.,Would like if it integrated into Office 365. Navigation is a bit limited for exploring.,8,Built a solid knowledge base that employees can access. Up to date on latest documentation that is added. Simple and quick access to information.,8,MS SharePoint,Zoom, JIRA Software, Jenkins,10,8Confluence Great for Large CompaniesWe use Confluence company-wide. It allows for the entire company to have access to important documents easily. Since our company is spread throughout different buildings, things like office maps and org charts are easy to find and live on Confluence. You are able to look up anyone in the company with ease, which is important when dealing with 200+ employees.,The ability to personalize for your company. Access to important documents is streamlined. It keeps communication flowing and frees up time for HR because important basic info is there, so there are fewer questions.,It's a bit difficult to navigate. Having to create one on one forms weekly gets messy in my "personal space" portion of the site. Better integration of different software.,8,Much more time saved for communication and questions. Managers are able to get forms from employees and kept in the same place. Great for file organization. It's fun, almost like a social media network for just your company.,JIRA Software,8,JIRA Software, Frame.io, Adobe Illustrator CCGreat tool for content creation in teamsConfluence is used as a tool for sharing documents and tracking their versions. Also, in software development, this can be now connected to other frequently used solutions such as JIRA or Enterprise Architect. Confluence also provides teamworking features with user access management. On top, Confluence adds reporting features with nice summarizations. Data can be exported for further BI analysis if required.,Overview of document versions, links users, and actions to content. Reports and overviews. Also, supports budgeting/financial tracking. Perfect for knowledge management in a team or with external partners/clients.,Until recently, it was hard to synchronize content with Enterprise Architect definitions. According to recent news from Atlassian, this should have been resolved by EA connector.,10,This solution prevents losing content/documents/versions, improves the integrity of projects or solution definitions and allows us to track back any change the users made. It can be used for agreement preparation with partners and archiving it. Invaluable in case of future possible lawsuits. By using it together with Confluence and JIRA, the quality of user support and its documentation will improve customer care/user support KPIs.,10,10Confluence has a better InfluenceIt is being used by our Development Team for requirements collaboration on various software (COTS) products being sold by the company.,Templates Formatting Sharing,Flexibility with template uploads,9,Work collaboration made easier More tasks getting done within the right time frame,MS SharePoint / SQL,9,JIRA Software, FreshdeskGreat for organizing coding teams in structured workflows and real time release trackingWe use Atlassian Confluence in every part of our organization from DevOPS to Technical Support tickets. The customizations you can do in Confluence are limitless and you can tailor Confluence to your departments exact needs.,Organize your work in spaces Discussion of work and tracking progress Provides visibility into our software projects,PDF exports only render gadgets as links Need better chat and phone support JIRA Gadgets in Confluence don't function correctly,8,Atlassian Confluence has improved our development process by better organization of code One repository for collaboration between DevOPS and CloudOPS teams Atlassian Confluence Has increased productivity by about 30% in our DevOPS and CloudOPS teams,,9,AWS EC2 Container Service, AWS Lambda, AWS Storage GatewayAtlassian keeps your organization organized!Atlassian Confluence is being used by the entire organization and customized per department. We use it for reviewing and updating documentation including security policies. It is a great source for collaborating with multiple teams to get items approved.,Document storage Diagrams Note taking,Diagram tool isn’t great App isn’t great Can load slowly,7,Easy to share and format and has centralized reporting.,SpringCM, DocuSign and Google Drive,8,Jira Service Desk, Google Drive, SlackHelps great teams to collaborate efficientlyConfluence is used to hold documents that are important to various software programs. These include install documents, patch notes, and update information. We use it company-wide and it ensures all information for software is held centrally.,It accurately displays documents and information well. It is easy to upload external files, which is key for installation walk-throughs. It is easy to allow manage users and groups to have access to specific areas only.,I feel the biggest area that is missing is support for more languages for source code. Also does not allow you to go through revision history. In-line comments for easier modifying would be nice. Easier integration with other applications would be nice.,9,It's hard to quantify. I believe it has just streamlined existing processes. It's made engineers more efficient at working. Allows us to ensure documents are always the most up-to-date and ensure no critical errors come from these.,,UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, IBM Watson AnalyticsAtlassian Confluence - Easy and Intuitive Knowledge SharingAtlassian Confluence is being used across my entire division to support knowledge management and communication across all aspects of software development. Our project managers use it for status reporting by leveraging its strong integration with JIRA, our software developers use it for technical documentation, decision logs, and cross-team collaboration. Our scrum masters use it for recording sprint ceremonies including retrospective details. I can't think of a single job function that doesn't use Confluence on a daily basis.,Atlassian Suite integration - As part of the Atlassian suite, Confluence makes it trivial to pull in information from other products in the suite, enabling easy linking to JIRA issues, BitBucket pull requests, etc. Confluence's In-Built Charts and reports make it really easy to construct detailed reports that clearly show the status of projects, defect backlogs, etc, in a digestible manner Confluence's Permission model is very robust and enables you to allow and disallow access to certain areas of Confluence based on users and groups, making it easy to control sensitive information.,Confluence's Query language can be fairly obtuse, and it'd be great to see Atlassian build a visual query builder to make constructing queries easier. Feature Discovery - Atlassian could do a better job of helping users discover its vast number of features. Sometimes I'll say "I wish Confluence could..." and one of my colleagues has discovered a way to do that. Features are generally easy to use, once you know they're there. Paid plugins - For an expensive tool such as Confluence, I'd like to see Atlassian start to buy up and incorporate some 3rd party plugins that provide exceptional value as part of the core product, rather than relying on end-users to implement those plugins correctly.,10,Confluence enables traceability from requirements to build, which has demonstrably improved our development processes as we have clear connection to all aspects of work done, throughout the development process. Confluence has unified our communications to one platform for persistent knowledge management, rather than trying to manage information across multiple tools At times, our organization favors using Confluence as a vehicle for communication, rather than having a quick meeting to discuss. We're getting better at addressing that, but it's something to keep in mind as you implement Confluence in your solution.,HCL Connections (formerly from IBM),7,JIRA Software, Bitbucket, HCL Connections (formerly from IBM), Trello, 1Password, LastPass for Business, Evernote, OneNote, Webex Meetings, Remote Desktop Manager, VMware ESXi, vSphere, OneDrive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Pivotal TrackerAtlassian's successful try on knowledge and document managementWe are currently using Confluence as a knowledge base for a worldwide project. Our usage of Confluence at the moment consists of creating knowledge articles about certain procedures, contact information (about the customer and about our own team), general information such as the SLA and to generate documentation for the customer, as he likes to know what we did to resolve a problem in his environment. Giving access to our customer to see what we have already created on Confluence gave him a lot of confidence in our work as he can see with his own eyes what are the solution and technologies we are using to sustain his working process.,Editing of pages on demand, without hassle Whole text editor, so you don't need to create things on Office and paste on Confluence Integration with JIRA SD and Trello Atlassian support is amazing!,User management can be a bit hard, especially between different companies The installation and configuration is not so simple,10,The customer's trust in our processes grew as he was now seeing what we did Different versions and/or solutions to the same problem are now centralized,,Jira Service Desk, Trello, ServiceNow,7,10,8Confluence for great documentation of your projects and companyWe use Atlassian Confluence as the company wiki for all IT related documentation. So it is primarily used by the IT department to document, although other departments are using the information also. At the moment we are using the on-prem version of Atlassian Confluence but are looking at the SaaS cloud version soon.,Easy to use Integrates nicely with Jira,Automated documentation could improve more. Occasional editing does not function properly, but not so often to impede your work. Interface is quite basic. Though there is a point to make that is a pro instead of a con.,8,Having a central wiki for documentation is a very valuable resource for many departments. Apart from versioning, you need to keep governance on it to mark old documentation as obsolete, otherwise, part of the pros for Atlassian Confluence are gone.,,9,JIRA Software, TOPdesk, NuclinoAtlassian Confluence is a great tool for documentation and integration into Jira Service Desk and Software appsConfluence is a great application for logging documentation in a centralized location. It has a lot of capabilities that are useful. Using Confluence by itself just seems wrong though, it works so well with the other applications by Atlassian, such as Software or Service Desk. The integration between these applications is really nice and is enough to overlook some of the downsides of the products.,Allows for a simple and organized layout of documentation and instructions. Very flexible layouts with many different features that you can add to the pages. You can also customize the look and feel of the pages.,Editing the pages could use more features that are easily accessible, but that is just going above and beyond what is necessary. It is currently "good enough". I wish there were built-in templates for documentation to make it easier for when you have multiple people typing up documents. It would just make it cleaner and more professional. Obviously, we can create our own templates, but it would have been nice to have this built-in.,10,Confluence has given our agents the incentive to develop their documentation and post it somewhere where any of the agents can search for and get to it. No more wasting time looking for documents, no more waiting for another agent to send you the help document.,7Atlassian Confluence makes documentation fun again!Confluence is used business-wide to help document policies, processes, and procedures. It is highly used by our technology departments as a knowledge base as well as a place to document project status and other relevant information.,Project planning. Meeting notes. Blog posts.,Build SSO into the product at no extra cost. Currently, you have to purchase a third-party plugin or if using Confluence Cloud you have to purchase Atlassian Access which is often the same price, if not more, than Confluence itself. When publishing changes to a document you will be notified if someone else has made changes. In order to publish your changes, you are forced to publish theirs as well but it doesn't tell you what their changes were.,10,Documentation is actually created and kept up to date without complaints. It has solved employee complaints regarding lack of communication and documentation as it provided us with a central location to publish this information.,MS SharePoint,10Confluence is a must-have in growing companiesAtlassian Confluence is used as our organization's central repository for documentation. Confluence essentially accomplishes the "teach a man to fish" principle, allowing for our employees to find answers to their own questions, look up org charts, check policies, and more. It is very helpful in keeping managers from being overloaded with hundreds of questions.,It has integrations with valuable tools. It is easy to use. It has SSO capabilities.,Searchability can be difficult at times. It's only as good as the group that manages it. Information can become antiquated if not frequently updated.,9,It enables us to scale quickly. Enables faster onboarding time. Improves transparency and communication across the business.,8,DiscoverOrg, RainKing (acquired by DiscoverOrg), OutreachGreat solution for knowledge management.[We're] Using Confluence for central knowledge management and documentation within our organization.,Great rich UI for formatting and diagramming Auto-save prevents lost work Hierarchical organization helps with search result accuracy,More snappy and responsive UI More accurate search results Better tools for approvals management,7,Improved documentation Greater visibility into project status Historical revision historys,9,8Confluence a nice addition to JIRA softwareWe use Confluence as a place to document all our I & O help articles and processes. We also build web pages for developers to use a quick reference point to look at test data and test environments. Also starting to build project requirements into these sites for IT and business teams to view and use.,Easy to set up pages Collaboration is easy and has version history Interacts well with JIRA software,More macros for customizing pages Licensing is expensive is you want people to have edit privliges Team Calendar plug in does not work well,10,Could lead us to get off SharePoint at some date Adaption has been really high and saved time with cross team communications Web pages are easy to build and update,MS SharePointA Good Collaboration and Information Management ToolWe use Confluence across our organization, but only for those collaborating on projects. In our case, we are designing a new business platform that requires extensive information gathering, sharing, and planning. We use Confluence to organize that project into teams, track to do items, share information, record meeting minutes, etc.,Collaboration. Confluence allows our entire organization to collaborate together. Instead of storing files and documents in folders, Confluence stores the files including versions, allows comments and context to be added, assigns permissions, and tracks workflows all in one place. Organization. Confluence is great at keeping everything organized. Assuming you set up your structure properly, it is easy to find your place in Confluence. Furthermore, the search engine allows you to search the entire instance for information. Notification. Confluence sends email notifications when you are referenced by someone else, assigned a duty, or any change is made to a page or group that you are subscribed to.,Search. The search functionality of Confluence is not that great. When typing a search there are often dozens or hundreds of irrelevant pages and you can't see enough in the search results to know which page you are looking for so it can sometimes be hard to find information you are looking for. Over-notification. If you subscribe to an active group, you will get a notification every time something changes. This means that if someone is actively updating during a meeting (taking minutes), you could receive several notification for the same set of changes.,8,I can't quantify this with dollars, but having all information in one place and having one place to collaborate on projects has definitely been more productive than without using Confluence.,Asana,Citrix NetScaler, Skype for Business (formerly Lync), NetSuiteUser for collaboration with IT on HR ProjectsOur organization utilizes Confluence along with Jira for additional project documentation and collaboration. Details on every part of our projects are captured, stored, and shared using confluence. This includes meeting notes, shared worksheets, requirements documents, system architecture as well as some process and procedures/outcomes of the projects. IT utilizes this system as a required way to store change information for updates and enhancements.,Fairly easy to use this product. The UI itself is user-friendly and easy to follow. Collaboration and updates are easy to turn on or off. The product is very scalable and can capture and organize a lot of data in one place.,Some of the options do not always work, this may be local setting but I find the option to edit some documents via Confluence to not always work, and we need to download, update, and then re-upload the document as a new version. Where there are a lot of notes and documentation entries it can be difficult to keep track of or sort through everything. How you utilize the program and label things is very important.,6,It has worked very well to share documents and requirements across multiple users in multiple locations. Helps organize project information/meeting notes/requirements so that we can retrieve these documents at any time.,Smartsheet,9,8,5Just amazing tool for documentationFor me, Atlassian Confluence is a one stop solution for all kinds of documentation. I use it whenever I need to write or document about my project. which includes flow diagram as well. This tool has been used by lots of us here and most of us use this for documentation and writing some other design as well.,First and foremost, if you need to maintain the documentation of your project, Atlassian Confluence is the best option for this. It has lots of plugins available which makes it very much useful, like gliffy, through which you can design flow diagrams very easily. Document collaboration with team member is also very good with this. You will get notified if someone from your team has changed something. It has wiki like syntax for markup and lots of other shortcuts which make development faster,The search feature could be improved. Search result are not always what we are looking for. It could be more flexible, just after adding few docs it starts becoming very clustered. It is costly to use it for personal use. I would like if it had free version with some limited version-- at least we could have basic features.,9,There are lots of positive impact of this tool, it has made the documentation task very easy. It has integration with other Atlassian tools like JIRA and Bitbucket which makes it very much useful and helps in tracking things I can't say much of negative impact but it is a bit costly.,,Visual Studio IDE, Jenkins, BambooSimple, but feature rich within the Atlassian ecosystemWe use Confluence across our entire organization. We purchased Confluence with JIRA as a file management and communication tool. We still rely heavily on Google Enterprise applications (GDocs/GDrive) but we needed something which could be closely connected to our JIRA project and development pipeline management use case. Confluence allows us to create different content, like cover pages, and long-text details which are linked to JIRA Issues, but aren't necessarily appropriate for custom fields in that JIRA Issue.,Easy management of documentation and files In-line linking to Users, Issues, and other Atlassian artifacts Ability to create Action Points from Confluence documents which email/interact with the user connected with the Action Point Excellent built-in Macros which can be used to tailor content (e.g. Code Blocks with user-defined styling and UX, Table of Content and Children page listings),Searching is a challenge in Confluence. If you know the Space (we group our functional areas into 'Spaces' in Confluence), then searching is straight-forward, but if you don't know the Space, the searching becomes a bit hit and miss. Organizing child pages under a parent is tedious. Rather than allowing a drag-and-drop interface, you have to go into Space Tools, then navigate through to the parent page and manually re-sort pages. Once in the Tools area, the feature set is good, but it would be nice to have fewer clicks or some sort of toggle to Edit Mode which allowed these features while still on the Confluence Page. When presenting Tables of JIRA Issues meeting specific criterion, the refresh/load time can get very slow. If there were an option to either prioritize the load order or the option to run synchronously/asynchronously, it would be a better UX. Adding Security to Pages/Spaces can be a challenge. The UI for this feature often simply tells you that the permissions are inherited, and you have to navigate up a level or three to find those specific 'inherited permissions'. Each page should have its own listing of permissions with some indication of whether they are inherited or not, with an option to edit on the page (not in the parent or grandparent, etc.). In working with the underlying database content, there are some major drawbacks... First, the underlying data for the pages is a long string of html, so any sort of searching is impossible. The option (or a built-in mechanism) to segment out sections of a page in the database would help in this effort tremendously. Second, the underlying database has no easy way to apply the same security placed on the pages (see two points above for Security UI issues). Because we cannot reliably determine access/permissions to the pages from the DB, we have locked down all DB tables to ensure that no sensitive information is viewable by unauthorized users.,8,Confluence has allowed us to centralize our technical documentation while allowing us to ensure access/PHI compliance with auditors,Google Drive,JIRA Software, Logi Analytics, Talend Open Studio, MariaDBA software developer's day using confluence.We use Confluence to document our engineering practices. From documenting releases and server updates to storing coding guidelines for developers. We've basically replaced MS Office documents and Sharepoint with Confluence. Confluences make for a more user-friendly way to store documentation that is searchable, flexible and far easier to maintain.,It is really easy to make document templates with Atlassian Confluence. If you don't like how you've organized your documents in Atlassian Confluence, you can easily rearrange your documents into a structure that better fits your business. Building a linked document structure is really easy within Atlassian Confluence. Atlassian Confluence is extensible with macros and extensions. There are integrations with other platforms for Atlassian Confluence.,I was perusing the developer documentation and I found it to be poorly organized. It just felt unapproachable. We get too many status updates from Atlassian cloud. I think they are trying to be transparent, but it feels more like oversharing. Sometimes I feel like their lines drawn with other Atlassian apps could be less hard. While there is substantial integration with Jira, for instance, it seems like you have to really look for ways to use the two together.,7,We spend less time looking for documentation. Our documentation for audits is much more complete and less cumbersome. We are able to move more information into the cloud and reduce local server maintenance load.,MS SharePoint and Team Foundation Server,Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio IDE, JIRA Software, Project Insight, Box, Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Remote Desktop ServicesAtlassian Confluence - a great choice for knowledge-based managementWe are mostly using it to document best practices, create software documentations, and store training materials and team calibrations. It is being used across the whole company but mostly by developers and trainers to provide documentation for agents. It is helping us to make the process of documenting and sharing knowledge as easy as possible while maintaining up-to-date information at all times.,Very user-friendly and easy to use by anyone. Easy to implement and does not require time to go from zero to live. Easy to integrate with other systems. Web-based, anyone with a browser can use it.,The user interface can use some improvements. I would like to see improvement to the way it handles document editing when 2 users are editing the same document at the same time. I still think it is good as is but it can use some improvements. The integration with other systems needs more work and can be more user-friendly.,10,Easy and fast knowledge-sharing helps with the ongoing education for our call center agents. Saves a lot of time storing, organizing, and housekeeping for software documentation. Keeps our knowledge base up-to-date and easy to maintain.,,MS SharePoint, Pega Platform, Slack
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Steven Carmean profile photo
October 05, 2019

Associate DevOps' year long approach at Confluence

Steven Carmean
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is the WGU wiki system for documentation across the entire company. It is encouraged as the 1 stop shop for most departments with a few that choose to use SharePoint or Service Now instead.
This is a helpful place for meeting notes, collaborate on tutorials and a handy storage for management tool links.
  • Great support out there since its widely used.
  • Very customizable with themes and color combinations.
  • Collaborative editing options.
  • A plethora of add-ons to customize your experience.
  • Migrations of data can be difficult.
  • Backup service breaks so you're better off manually backing up.
  • The log-analyzer can sometimes treat symptoms, but may not see the root cause to a problem with the system.
If you are looking for a scalable solution for confidential notes, knowledge, or for a place to throw a general memo, then Confluence is a great system.
This system carries quite a cost to it, so if you aren't willing to fork out the funding or if you don't have a large enough user base (I'd recommend at least 500 active users), then there are alternative solutions that are rather effective such as Sharepoint or a Gsuite equivalent.
Read Steven Carmean's full review
Bailey Troutt profile photo
September 30, 2019

Stunning project management with Confluence

Bailey Troutt
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Atlassian
Confluence provides me a bundle of solutions to my business with great intelligence and
working efficiencies. Moreover, the feedback collecting feature of this
particular product helps me in taking useful decisions for my company wherever
and whatever I want. Furthermore, it helps me in making effective communication
with all my working partners that further facilitates me to overcome
communication barriers as well.


  • This effective application has so many useful advantages that create flexibility to edit different types of documents and also to edit all my rich content within just a few seconds with all these amazing features.
  • It has a platform for managing a lot of files even longer files or some tiny pieces of documents.
  • It has a useful feature that surely helps me out in my tough schedule is it’s about to create useful meeting notes that are quite useful in order to get a reminder as well.
  • By using Atlassian Confluence now I can confidently say that I can manage dozens of files in one single location and also discussion among the teammates is now more convenient with it.
  • Workload issues are so much less by using it so, for me, there is no drawback in it.
  • Because of its superb features and functionalities, it has become my favorite companion now. I do not have to face any kind of trouble.
Atlassian
Confluence is the best project management software for each and every type of
organization regardless of their size and working resources. Moreover, this
product is beneficial enough to make my work history at a safe place for longer
period of time. I would definitely recommend it to others to take benefit out of it.



Read Bailey Troutt's full review
Michael Gibson profile photo
September 30, 2019

Powerful tool with no design inspiration

Michael Gibson
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Atlassian Confluence usage has grown in our business as a method to capture ideas, build on them and then finalise a decision. The whole team uses it. We also needed a place to capture our reference documents and processes as they are defined. Decide we want Graphic Designers to load mock-ups straight to the Google Drive folder for a customer so sales or design support just does a follow-up email/call? Then edit their "Process Guide" in Confluence.
  • Load an idea. Never lose it. Everyone can edit the core page or add comments. The old "parking bay" full of post-it notes doesn't get lost at the end of the conference.
  • Templates - lots of different formats that provide suggested processes improvements in their very design. And we edit the pages to suit our company process anyway.
  • Extra tools. Add images, links, Trello board, JIRA task links, etc. I found the inbuilt draw.io tool useful the other day when working on a process and now that diagram is added to the proposal document we send customers.
  • Pages can be categorised, so we have an Internal Process pages, Project pages, Team Directory pages, etc.
  • Atlassian Confluence is not very graphic so the user interface has a lot of options which can be daunting for new users. It feels like an old system - so busy with text options everywhere, I feel like I want to break out in DOS commands and throw away my mouse.
  • Navigation is not always intuitive - I know there is flexibility there, but it can be confusing. Therefore user engagement is not as strong as it could be.
  • I'd love to have tables displaying pages alphabetically with field and filter options. I have customer information but want to see the missing info more easily so I can action these. Or add a customer and it sorts itself in the right order. And then my template for customers can have a field added for all customers. There is a danger that the data can become too static as it doesn't make it easy to see the data. Same forms approach has an application to our other categories
We find it can be a good "knowledge base" for projects and ideas. You can load up process ideas and finalised processes easily, documents, tables for marking off progress. I personally find the design and styling uninspiring and I think that is why usage in the team is lower than I would like.
Read Michael Gibson's full review
Suleman Ahmad profile photo
September 27, 2019

Using Atlassian Confluence for 2+ years.

Suleman Ahmad
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use the Atlassian Confluence for ideas, brainstorming, product stories, changelogs, standup meetings, retrospective meetings and to track the production issues... the list goes on. We use it across our whole organization. Previously we use the MS Word and MS Powerpoint for user stories, and that became too difficult to maintain the content.
  • Built-in tools (drag and drop) to format the page
  • Tagging team members
  • Email notifications for changes
  • I start watching a few pages, but Confluence then added me in all pages by default and now I am getting a lot of notifications for irrelevant pages
  • Sometimes when my teammate adds some points in a Standup meeting against my work then I only get the empty response in email notifications without the details of what was added. (I don't know why the content is missing)
Atlassian Confluence is the best for collaborative user story writing. It gets linked to the JIRA issues so we can keep the tickets as simple as possible and add all the details in Atlassian Confluence.
Read Suleman Ahmad's full review
Kaleb-John Loo profile photo
September 24, 2019

Simplicity at its core

Kaleb-John Loo
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is primarily used in the organization for documentation. Confluence is utilized to access information about our hardware and software solutions in a convenient location. It provides new and old employees the ability to gain information about an area that they may have questions about. It creates an area to provide a more in depth well of knowledge about a particular area or topic that is not documented elsewhere due to a lack of a solid structure.
  • Quick way to document knowledge.
  • Easy to access and navigate.
  • Provides updates on latest documentation.
  • Customizable.
  • Searchable.
  • Would like if it integrated into Office 365.
  • Navigation is a bit limited for exploring.
Atlassian Confluence is well suited for managing a knowledge base for an organization. It is easy to search for information that one may need about a particular project or subject. It is, however, more of a wiki and less of a document management platform, so if there is a need to manage heavy documents, then this may not suit that need.
Read Kaleb-John Loo's full review
Hilary Hobbs profile photo
September 15, 2019

Confluence Great for Large Companies

Hilary Hobbs
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Confluence company-wide. It allows for the entire company to have access to important documents easily. Since our company is spread throughout different buildings, things like office maps and org charts are easy to find and live on Confluence. You are able to look up anyone in the company with ease, which is important when dealing with 200+ employees.
  • The ability to personalize for your company.
  • Access to important documents is streamlined.
  • It keeps communication flowing and frees up time for HR because important basic info is there, so there are fewer questions.
  • It's a bit difficult to navigate.
  • Having to create one on one forms weekly gets messy in my "personal space" portion of the site.
  • Better integration of different software.
Large companies would do well with Confluence. Small companies who don't need broad communication would be wasting money. It's hard to get important info easily accessed with larger companies, and Confluence allows that information to be readily available to anyone who needs it, regardless of position.
Read Hilary Hobbs's full review
Viktor Mulac profile photo
August 13, 2019

Great tool for content creation in teams

Viktor Mulac
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is used as a tool for sharing documents and tracking their versions. Also, in software development, this can be now connected to other frequently used solutions such as JIRA or Enterprise Architect. Confluence also provides teamworking features with user access management. On top, Confluence adds reporting features with nice summarizations. Data can be exported for further BI analysis if required.
  • Overview of document versions, links users, and actions to content.
  • Reports and overviews.
  • Also, supports budgeting/financial tracking.
  • Perfect for knowledge management in a team or with external partners/clients.
  • Until recently, it was hard to synchronize content with Enterprise Architect definitions. According to recent news from Atlassian, this should have been resolved by EA connector.
Very good support for all main scenarios such as team collaboration on documents, organization of work and tracking the progress. It provides a clean, nice view of the actual version of documents of any kind, including graphics, schemes, and diagrams, etc. Supports mobile devices with a responsive interface, allowing us to keep in touch with other content creators on the go.
Read Viktor Mulac's full review
Sunny Grewal profile photo
October 04, 2019

Confluence has a better Influence

Sunny Grewal
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is being used by our Development Team for requirements collaboration on various software (COTS) products being sold by the company.
  • Templates
  • Formatting
  • Sharing
  • Flexibility with template uploads
The pre-designed templates are great to get started. From there you may modify it to suit your needs.
Uploads from OneNote or PDFs are not an option.
Read Sunny Grewal's full review
Ted Cook profile photo
September 27, 2019

Great for organizing coding teams in structured workflows and real time release tracking

Ted Cook
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Review Source
We use Atlassian Confluence in every part of our organization from DevOPS to Technical Support tickets. The customizations you can do in Confluence are limitless and you can tailor Confluence to your departments exact needs.
  • Organize your work in spaces
  • Discussion of work and tracking progress
  • Provides visibility into our software projects
  • PDF exports only render gadgets as links
  • Need better chat and phone support
  • JIRA Gadgets in Confluence don't function correctly
Great for DevOPS and CloudOPS software development as a repository for code revisions, trouble tickets, collaboration and beta version testing.
Read Ted Cook's full review
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September 25, 2019

Atlassian keeps your organization organized!

Siddique Chaudhry, CCSK
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Atlassian Confluence is being used by the entire organization and customized per department. We use it for reviewing and updating documentation including security policies. It is a great source for collaborating with multiple teams to get items approved.
  • Document storage
  • Diagrams
  • Note taking
  • Diagram tool isn’t great
  • App isn’t great
  • Can load slowly
If you have an organization that needs to document security policies, it’s a great file repository for all staff to access. The access can be limited as well.
Read Siddique Chaudhry, CCSK's full review
Ben Williams profile photo
August 09, 2019

Helps great teams to collaborate efficiently

Ben Williams
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is used to hold documents that are important to various software programs. These include install documents, patch notes, and update information. We use it company-wide and it ensures all information for software is held centrally.
  • It accurately displays documents and information well.
  • It is easy to upload external files, which is key for installation walk-throughs.
  • It is easy to allow manage users and groups to have access to specific areas only.
  • I feel the biggest area that is missing is support for more languages for source code.
  • Also does not allow you to go through revision history.
  • In-line comments for easier modifying would be nice.
  • Easier integration with other applications would be nice.
It's great for engineering and software teams who need quick access to software notes and details. It is even better if you use other Atlassian products as the idea integration is through other tools by Atlassian.
Read Ben Williams's full review
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October 04, 2019

Atlassian Confluence - Easy and Intuitive Knowledge Sharing

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Atlassian Confluence is being used across my entire division to support knowledge management and communication across all aspects of software development. Our project managers use it for status reporting by leveraging its strong integration with JIRA, our software developers use it for technical documentation, decision logs, and cross-team collaboration. Our scrum masters use it for recording sprint ceremonies including retrospective details. I can't think of a single job function that doesn't use Confluence on a daily basis.
  • Atlassian Suite integration - As part of the Atlassian suite, Confluence makes it trivial to pull in information from other products in the suite, enabling easy linking to JIRA issues, Bitbucket pull requests, etc.
  • Confluence's In-Built Charts and reports make it really easy to construct detailed reports that clearly show the status of projects, defect backlogs, etc, in a digestible manner
  • Confluence's Permission model is very robust and enables you to allow and disallow access to certain areas of Confluence based on users and groups, making it easy to control sensitive information.
  • Confluence's Query language can be fairly obtuse, and it'd be great to see Atlassian build a visual query builder to make constructing queries easier.
  • Feature Discovery - Atlassian could do a better job of helping users discover its vast number of features. Sometimes I'll say "I wish Confluence could..." and one of my colleagues has discovered a way to do that. Features are generally easy to use, once you know they're there.
  • Paid plugins - For an expensive tool such as Confluence, I'd like to see Atlassian start to buy up and incorporate some 3rd party plugins that provide exceptional value as part of the core product, rather than relying on end-users to implement those plugins correctly.
Atlassian Confluence is extremely well suited for capturing knowledge and sharing it with your organization. Whether that takes the form of blog posts, technical documentation, or project status reports, Confluence can handle it all. Anytime that written documentation with detail would be valuable to your organization, Atlassian Confluence is THE tool to use.

The only time I'd say that it is less suited for use is as a substitute for a face-to-face conversation. Sometimes people will use Atlassian Confluence as a communications vehicle when an in-person dialog would be much more expedient. Of course, you could always capture the output of that conversation as a Confluence page!
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September 17, 2019

Atlassian's successful try on knowledge and document management

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are currently using Confluence as a knowledge base for a worldwide project. Our usage of Confluence at the moment consists of creating knowledge articles about certain procedures, contact information (about the customer and about our own team), general information such as the SLA and to generate documentation for the customer, as he likes to know what we did to resolve a problem in his environment. Giving access to our customer to see what we have already created on Confluence gave him a lot of confidence in our work as he can see with his own eyes what are the solution and technologies we are using to sustain his working process.
  • Editing of pages on demand, without hassle
  • Whole text editor, so you don't need to create things on Office and paste on Confluence
  • Integration with JIRA SD and Trello
  • Atlassian support is amazing!
  • User management can be a bit hard, especially between different companies
  • The installation and configuration is not so simple
Confluence is very good in situations where you need to share with the customer what are your instructions and procedures to resolve a specific problem. When asked, you only need to send him the knowledge-base article as a proof of work. We also use it to share this kind of information with the overseas team, as we are in a country and some of our coworkers live in another country far away.
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October 04, 2019

Confluence for great documentation of your projects and company

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Atlassian Confluence as the company wiki for all IT related documentation. So it is primarily used by the IT department to document, although other departments are using the information also. At the moment we are using the on-prem version of Atlassian Confluence but are looking at the SaaS cloud version soon.
  • Easy to use
  • Integrates nicely with JIRA
  • Automated documentation could improve more.
  • Occasional editing does not function properly, but not so often to impede your work.
  • Interface is quite basic. Though there is a point to make that is a pro instead of a con.
Great for creating company documentation and/or manuals. Being able to create spaces makes organizing your wiki easier. It is better than many free or cheap/open-source alternatives where you would have to do a lot more work to create something similar. Having add-ons for further features is excellent.
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September 20, 2019

Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for documentation and integration into Jira Service Desk and Software apps

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is a great application for logging documentation in a centralized location. It has a lot of capabilities that are useful. Using Confluence by itself just seems wrong though, it works so well with the other applications by Atlassian, such as Software or Service Desk. The integration between these applications is really nice and is enough to overlook some of the downsides of the products.
  • Allows for a simple and organized layout of documentation and instructions.
  • Very flexible layouts with many different features that you can add to the pages. You can also customize the look and feel of the pages.
  • Editing the pages could use more features that are easily accessible, but that is just going above and beyond what is necessary. It is currently "good enough".
  • I wish there were built-in templates for documentation to make it easier for when you have multiple people typing up documents. It would just make it cleaner and more professional. Obviously, we can create our own templates, but it would have been nice to have this built-in.
The Service Desk utilizes the Confluence sections where access has been granted for customer visibility so that when they are looking to submit a ticket, it gives recommended solutions prior to submitting the ticket. Also, from the agent side on the Service Desk, they will be giving a few possible solution documents to the ticket in question. We have not built out our documentation that much, but I can see this being EXTREMELY helpful for troubleshooting tickets.
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September 17, 2019

Atlassian Confluence makes documentation fun again!

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Confluence is used business-wide to help document policies, processes, and procedures. It is highly used by our technology departments as a knowledge base as well as a place to document project status and other relevant information.
  • Project planning.
  • Meeting notes.
  • Blog posts.
  • Build SSO into the product at no extra cost. Currently, you have to purchase a third-party plugin or if using Confluence Cloud you have to purchase Atlassian Access which is often the same price, if not more, than Confluence itself.
  • When publishing changes to a document you will be notified if someone else has made changes. In order to publish your changes, you are forced to publish theirs as well but it doesn't tell you what their changes were.
Atlassian Confluence is great as a central place to take and store meeting notes. It's also very nice because multiple people can edit the same page at the same time. It is also a fantastic place to store project status information to make it easily accessible to many people. We find that because Confluence is so easy to use that our employees are much better at creating documentation and keeping it up to date.
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September 14, 2019

Confluence is a must-have in growing companies

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Atlassian Confluence is used as our organization's central repository for documentation. Confluence essentially accomplishes the "teach a man to fish" principle, allowing for our employees to find answers to their own questions, look up org charts, check policies, and more. It is very helpful in keeping managers from being overloaded with hundreds of questions.
  • It has integrations with valuable tools.
  • It is easy to use.
  • It has SSO capabilities.
  • Searchability can be difficult at times.
  • It's only as good as the group that manages it.
  • Information can become antiquated if not frequently updated.
Organizations that are fast-growing and/or geographically dispersed would benefit from Atlassian Confluence. Where things move quickly, it's helpful to have all processes and systems documented so new hires and other teams do not have to rely on individual people passing the information along. They can find everything they need in Confluence.
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August 05, 2019

Great solution for knowledge management.

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
[We're] Using Confluence for central knowledge management and documentation within our organization.
  • Great rich UI for formatting and diagramming
  • Auto-save prevents lost work
  • Hierarchical organization helps with search result accuracy
  • More snappy and responsive UI
  • More accurate search results
  • Better tools for approvals management
Great for corporate-wide knowledge management.
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May 07, 2019

Confluence a nice addition to JIRA software

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Confluence as a place to document all our I & O help articles and processes. We also build web pages for developers to use a quick reference point to look at test data and test environments. Also starting to build project requirements into these sites for IT and business teams to view and use.
  • Easy to set up pages
  • Collaboration is easy and has version history
  • Interacts well with JIRA software
  • More macros for customizing pages
  • Licensing is expensive is you want people to have edit privliges
  • Team Calendar plug in does not work well
Highly likely to recommend especially if IT organization is using JIRA. They work well together and it can be a good replacement for SharePoint if you are using that for housing requirements on IT projects. Easy to work with support team when issues do come up, create a ticket and response time is very good.
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Chris Snelling, CFA profile photo
December 08, 2018

A Good Collaboration and Information Management Tool

Chris Snelling, CFA
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Confluence across our organization, but only for those collaborating on projects. In our case, we are designing a new business platform that requires extensive information gathering, sharing, and planning. We use Confluence to organize that project into teams, track to do items, share information, record meeting minutes, etc.
  • Collaboration. Confluence allows our entire organization to collaborate together. Instead of storing files and documents in folders, Confluence stores the files including versions, allows comments and context to be added, assigns permissions, and tracks workflows all in one place.
  • Organization. Confluence is great at keeping everything organized. Assuming you set up your structure properly, it is easy to find your place in Confluence. Furthermore, the search engine allows you to search the entire instance for information.
  • Notification. Confluence sends email notifications when you are referenced by someone else, assigned a duty, or any change is made to a page or group that you are subscribed to.
  • Search. The search functionality of Confluence is not that great. When typing a search there are often dozens or hundreds of irrelevant pages and you can't see enough in the search results to know which page you are looking for so it can sometimes be hard to find information you are looking for.
  • Over-notification. If you subscribe to an active group, you will get a notification every time something changes. This means that if someone is actively updating during a meeting (taking minutes), you could receive several notification for the same set of changes.
Confluence works well in a system where a lot of people are collaborating. It keeps everything organized and is located in one easy to access location. It is ideal for working on projects together. Especially projects that require information sharing. Compared to email communication, Confluence holds the information from all users. This is compared to using traditional file folders and email, whereby there are access issues and not all information is shared or searchable.
Read Chris Snelling, CFA's full review
Joshua Pekar profile photo
April 02, 2019

User for collaboration with IT on HR Projects

Joshua Pekar
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Our organization utilizes Confluence along with Jira for additional project documentation and collaboration. Details on every part of our projects are captured, stored, and shared using confluence. This includes meeting notes, shared worksheets, requirements documents, system architecture as well as some process and procedures/outcomes of the projects. IT utilizes this system as a required way to store change information for updates and enhancements.
  • Fairly easy to use this product. The UI itself is user-friendly and easy to follow.
  • Collaboration and updates are easy to turn on or off.
  • The product is very scalable and can capture and organize a lot of data in one place.
  • Some of the options do not always work, this may be local setting but I find the option to edit some documents via Confluence to not always work, and we need to download, update, and then re-upload the document as a new version.
  • Where there are a lot of notes and documentation entries it can be difficult to keep track of or sort through everything. How you utilize the program and label things is very important.
Confluence can link to Jira and be utilized as part of your project management solution. I think if you are using Jira this application may make sense to utilize for tracking all important details. However, I haven't seen other projects that have a connection to Jira to say that this is the best product available. With big projects, the document trail seems to be a little messy.
Read Joshua Pekar's full review
Rounak Jangir profile photo
December 14, 2018

Just amazing tool for documentation

Rounak Jangir
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
For me, Atlassian Confluence is a one stop solution for all kinds of documentation. I use it whenever I need to write or document about my project. which includes flow diagram as well. This tool has been used by lots of us here and most of us use this for documentation and writing some other design as well.
  • First and foremost, if you need to maintain the documentation of your project, Atlassian Confluence is the best option for this.
  • It has lots of plugins available which makes it very much useful, like gliffy, through which you can design flow diagrams very easily.
  • Document collaboration with team member is also very good with this. You will get notified if someone from your team has changed something.
  • It has wiki like syntax for markup and lots of other shortcuts which make development faster
  • The search feature could be improved. Search result are not always what we are looking for.
  • It could be more flexible, just after adding few docs it starts becoming very clustered.
  • It is costly to use it for personal use. I would like if it had free version with some limited version-- at least we could have basic features.
If you want to write something down-- it may be design flow, project document or something else-- Atlassian Confluence is just the best option to use. It has lots of plugins available like Gliffy and Codeblock, which makes your doc more clean. Outside this scenario, I think it is not well-suited. One more thing-- it is too costly to use it on your own.
Read Rounak Jangir's full review
Johnny Stevens profile photo
December 12, 2018

Simple, but feature rich within the Atlassian ecosystem

Johnny Stevens
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Confluence across our entire organization. We purchased Confluence with JIRA as a file management and communication tool. We still rely heavily on Google Enterprise applications (GDocs/GDrive) but we needed something which could be closely connected to our JIRA project and development pipeline management use case. Confluence allows us to create different content, like cover pages, and long-text details which are linked to JIRA Issues, but aren't necessarily appropriate for custom fields in that JIRA Issue.
  • Easy management of documentation and files
  • In-line linking to Users, Issues, and other Atlassian artifacts
  • Ability to create Action Points from Confluence documents which email/interact with the user connected with the Action Point
  • Excellent built-in Macros which can be used to tailor content (e.g. Code Blocks with user-defined styling and UX, Table of Content and Children page listings)
  • Searching is a challenge in Confluence. If you know the Space (we group our functional areas into 'Spaces' in Confluence), then searching is straight-forward, but if you don't know the Space, the searching becomes a bit hit and miss.
  • Organizing child pages under a parent is tedious. Rather than allowing a drag-and-drop interface, you have to go into Space Tools, then navigate through to the parent page and manually re-sort pages. Once in the Tools area, the feature set is good, but it would be nice to have fewer clicks or some sort of toggle to Edit Mode which allowed these features while still on the Confluence Page.
  • When presenting Tables of JIRA Issues meeting specific criterion, the refresh/load time can get very slow. If there were an option to either prioritize the load order or the option to run synchronously/asynchronously, it would be a better UX.
  • Adding Security to Pages/Spaces can be a challenge. The UI for this feature often simply tells you that the permissions are inherited, and you have to navigate up a level or three to find those specific 'inherited permissions'. Each page should have its own listing of permissions with some indication of whether they are inherited or not, with an option to edit on the page (not in the parent or grandparent, etc.).
  • In working with the underlying database content, there are some major drawbacks... First, the underlying data for the pages is a long string of html, so any sort of searching is impossible. The option (or a built-in mechanism) to segment out sections of a page in the database would help in this effort tremendously.
  • Second, the underlying database has no easy way to apply the same security placed on the pages (see two points above for Security UI issues). Because we cannot reliably determine access/permissions to the pages from the DB, we have locked down all DB tables to ensure that no sensitive information is viewable by unauthorized users.
If you are looking for a CMS-style, text to web document system, and you don't have access to Google, then Confluence is a viable option. Its tight integration to JIRA makes it more useful than Google in our scenario, although I often wonder if we would do ourselves a favor and write some Google Scripts to tighten that end of the integration and drop Confluence.
Read Johnny Stevens's full review
Clay Horste profile photo
December 11, 2018

A software developer's day using confluence.

Clay Horste
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Confluence to document our engineering practices. From documenting releases and server updates to storing coding guidelines for developers. We've basically replaced MS Office documents and Sharepoint with Confluence. Confluences make for a more user-friendly way to store documentation that is searchable, flexible and far easier to maintain.
  • It is really easy to make document templates with Atlassian Confluence.
  • If you don't like how you've organized your documents in Atlassian Confluence, you can easily rearrange your documents into a structure that better fits your business.
  • Building a linked document structure is really easy within Atlassian Confluence.
  • Atlassian Confluence is extensible with macros and extensions.
  • There are integrations with other platforms for Atlassian Confluence.
  • I was perusing the developer documentation and I found it to be poorly organized. It just felt unapproachable.
  • We get too many status updates from Atlassian cloud. I think they are trying to be transparent, but it feels more like oversharing.
  • Sometimes I feel like their lines drawn with other Atlassian apps could be less hard. While there is substantial integration with JIRA, for instance, it seems like you have to really look for ways to use the two together.
We use Atlassian Confluence to organize our software development and IS teams. We use it for meeting agendas, documenting software releases, documenting server updates, policies, procedures. We don't, however, use it for documenting software development requirements or for documenting QA test cases. Confluence feels like it could go the extra steps and provide a good place for documenting the actual creation of software, but we still end up going to other vendors for those items.
Read Clay Horste's full review
Ammar Aldaffaie profile photo
December 10, 2018

Atlassian Confluence - a great choice for knowledge-based management

Ammar Aldaffaie
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are mostly using it to document best practices, create software documentations, and store training materials and team calibrations. It is being used across the whole company but mostly by developers and trainers to provide documentation for agents. It is helping us to make the process of documenting and sharing knowledge as easy as possible while maintaining up-to-date information at all times.
  • Very user-friendly and easy to use by anyone.
  • Easy to implement and does not require time to go from zero to live.
  • Easy to integrate with other systems.
  • Web-based, anyone with a browser can use it.
  • The user interface can use some improvements.
  • I would like to see improvement to the way it handles document editing when 2 users are editing the same document at the same time. I still think it is good as is but it can use some improvements.
  • The integration with other systems needs more work and can be more user-friendly.
If you ever need a site where you can share knowledge and maintain documentation, this is one of the best options. You might have heard of SharePoint, which is similar in a lot of ways. Confluence is very modern and flexible. This is great if you have a team of developers who need to document their process and use of the software or provide documentation to agents.
Read Ammar Aldaffaie's full review

Confluence Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (890)
8.2
Likelihood to Renew (15)
10.0
Usability (9)
8.4
Availability (2)
10.0
Performance (4)
9.7
Support (18)
8.5
Implementation (1)
9.0
Product Scalability (1)
10.0

Feature Scorecard Summary

Task Management (53)
7.8
Gantt Charts (12)
7.6
Scheduling (21)
7.0
Workflow Automation (37)
7.6
Mobile Access (48)
7.4
Search (63)
7.5
Visual planning tools (51)
7.7
Chat (15)
6.4
Notifications (63)
8.4
Discussions (59)
8.3
Surveys (15)
7.1
Internal knowledgebase (57)
8.9
Integrates with GoToMeeting (3)
6.0
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts (7)
8.8
Integrates with Outlook (10)
9.3
Versioning (52)
9.0
Video files (35)
7.5
Audio files (32)
8.2
Document collaboration (60)
8.6
Access control (58)
8.6
Advanced security features (42)
8.5
Integrates with Google Drive (22)
7.3
Device sync (23)
8.1

About Confluence

Confluence aims to give you the power to create anything and everything, from meeting notes, project plans, product requirements, and more. Include multimedia, dynamic content, and make your work come to life.

Share PDFs, Office docs, images, and more in Confluence. Automatic versioning, instant previews, full-text search, and pinned comments make it easy to manage your files.
Categories:  Document Management,  Help Authoring,  Collaboration

Confluence Features

Project Management Features
Has featureTask Management
Does not have featureGantt Charts
Does not have featureScheduling
Has featureWorkflow Automation
Has featureMobile Access
Has featureFile tracking
Has featureTagging
Has featureSearch
Has featureIntegrates with other Project Management Tools
Has featureVisual planning tools
Communication Features
Does not have featureChat
Has featureStatus updates and activity feed
Has featureNotifications
Has featureComments and feedback
Has featureDiscussions
Has featureUser directory and online status
Has featureSharing and privacy
Does not have featureSurveys
Has featureInternal knowledgebase
Does not have featureIntegrates with Skype
Does not have featureIntegrates with GoToMeeting
Does not have featureIntegrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts
Does not have featureIntegrates with Outlook
File Sharing & Management Features
Has featureVersioning
Has featureDocument files
Has featureImage files
Has featureVideo files
Has featureAudio files
Has featureDocument collaboration
Has featureShared folders
Has featureAccess control
Has featureAdvanced security features
Has featureIntegrates with Google Drive
Does not have featureIntegrates with SharePoint
Has featureDevice sync
Has featureWeb interface
Has featureFile change notifications
Has featureSimultaneous editing

Confluence Integrations

MS SharePoint, Microsoft Office 365, Gliffy, JIRA Software, Jira Service Desk, Google Drive, Box, Bitbucket, GitHub, Slack, Salesforce Einstein Analytics (formerly Wave Analytics)

Confluence Competitors

Pricing

Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
Entry-level set up fee?No

Confluence Support Options

 Free VersionPaid Version
Live Chat
Email
Forum/Community
FAQ/Knowledgebase
Social Media
Video Tutorials / Webinar
Phone

Confluence Technical Details

Deployment Types:On-premise, SaaS
Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Mac
Mobile Application:No