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Confluence

Confluence

Overview

What is Confluence?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Atlassian Confluence is a versatile tool that organizations use to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. Users have found it to be …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 23 features
  • Document collaboration (104)
    9.0
    90%
  • Access control (102)
    8.7
    87%
  • Notifications (107)
    8.2
    82%
  • Search (107)
    6.8
    68%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Free

$0

Cloud
Free for 10 Users

Standard

$5

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Premium

$10

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.atlassian.com/software/conf…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $10 per month
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Product Demos

Confluence-Demo: Unterseiten bis in beliebige Tiefe anlegen

YouTube

Atlassian Confluence 101 - Delete and Restore a Page

YouTube

Atlassian Confluence 101 - Organize Pages

YouTube

Sibling Tabs User Macro for Atlassian Confluence

YouTube
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Features

Project Management

Project management software provides capabilities to streamline management of complex projects through task management, team collaboration and workflow automation

7.2
Avg 7.8

Communication

Features that allow team members to communicate about collaborative projects and keep each other informed of their opinions and progress.

7.9
Avg 8.0

File Sharing & Management

Features that allow collaborators to view, work on, and organize files.

7.9
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is 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.

Confluence Features

Project Management Features

  • Supported: Task Management
  • Supported: Workflow Automation
  • Supported: Mobile Access
  • Supported: File tracking
  • Supported: Tagging
  • Supported: Search
  • Supported: Integrates with other Project Management Tools
  • Supported: Visual planning tools

Communication Features

  • Supported: Status updates and activity feed
  • Supported: Notifications
  • Supported: Comments and feedback
  • Supported: Discussions
  • Supported: User directory and online status
  • Supported: Sharing and privacy
  • Supported: Internal knowledgebase

File Sharing & Management Features

  • Supported: Versioning
  • Supported: Document files
  • Supported: Image files
  • Supported: Video files
  • Supported: Audio files
  • Supported: Document collaboration
  • Supported: Shared folders
  • Supported: Access control
  • Supported: Advanced security features
  • Supported: Integrates with Google Drive
  • Supported: Device sync
  • Supported: Web interface
  • Supported: File change notifications
  • Supported: Simultaneous editing

Confluence Competitors

Confluence Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Confluence starts at $10.

Microsoft Yammer, Microsoft SharePoint, and OpenText Vibe are common alternatives for Confluence.

Reviewers rate Integrates with Outlook highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Confluence are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(2106)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Atlassian Confluence is a versatile tool that organizations use to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. Users have found it to be an effective solution for various use cases across departments and teams. For example, Confluence serves as a central document system for product owners and product management, storing important project documents and related information. It is also used as an internal Wikipedia and knowledge base, providing how-to guides, descriptions, and tracking project status.

Confluence plays a crucial role in facilitating communication and coordination within organizations. It helps teams effectively share knowledge, onboard new employees, and provide assistance to other teams by finding configuration files and debugging information. Many users appreciate its ability to document procedures and information in an easily accessible way, creating a centralized repository for organizational documentation.

With its wide range of features, Confluence is utilized for collaboration, project management, process and quality management, and knowledge management. It enables teams to coordinate tasks more easily, ensuring everyone has access to the necessary information. The software is also valued by IT departments as a knowledge base and internal web space. Additionally, it serves as a valuable agile tool for custom development services, providing a centralized place for documentation and integration with other tools.

Overall, Atlassian Confluence offers a robust platform for enhancing teamwork and knowledge sharing within organizations. Its versatility makes it suitable for various industries and departments, improving communication, productivity, and information accessibility.

Users recommend using Confluence for creating, storing, and retrieving business-critical resources. They suggest using Confluence for documentation work, especially in an agile project management environment. Users find Confluence to be a great tool for remote teams to work together and increase efficiency. They also recommend it for team collaboration and seamless project work. Users suggest using Confluence to eliminate communication gaps and improve visibility and backtracking. They think Confluence is excellent for sharing information and integrating with other tools. Additionally, reviewers recommend Confluence for workplaces with flexible schedules and remote working. They suggest considering Confluence when using other Atlassian tools for excellent integration. Users recommend using Confluence for team development documentation and any type of organizational documentation needs. They find Confluence easy to use and believe it makes documentation fun and easier to record. Users suggest using Confluence along with Jira for the best experience. They also recommend establishing a system for creating neat Confluence pages. Users suggest considering Confluence if already using the Atlassian suite but mention the need for improvements in integrations and editing abilities. Additionally, users recommend Confluence only if using Jira, as it may save money compared to other options. However, they suggest considering other options if complicated needs are required.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(76-100 of 126)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The entire organization uses it for storing internal information (almost like an encyclopedia of the company). Each department handles their own space within Confluence.
  • Macros! There are a lot of macros which give you creativity to how you want to make a page.
  • Plugins: The JIRA macro/plug in lets us display stats for project in various ways.
  • Formatting: I have trouble with formatting pages to look perfect. For example, I have issues with making a table.
  • Searching: Sometimes the search results confuse me based on what I inputted.
It is great for documenting how your product works, keeping a historical record of releases, and having pages for project updates.
Chris Snelling, CFA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Jayant Rana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  1. After getting comfortable with Confluence, it is very efficient and easy to do documentation.
  2. It allows to import and export the information stored in any format.
  3. It allows for the other team members to have joint access to the information.
  4. It helps in optimizing any work for a company.
  5. It is compatible with every Atlassian product.
  6. Apart from advantages, it has some cons as well. It sometimes faces performance lack.
  7. Some integration features are difficult to figure out and take time to get comfortable.
  8. Takes the huge amount of space, as a result, takes time to load as well.
  • It allows to import and export the information stored in any format.
  • It allows for the other team members to have joint access to the information.
  • It helps in optimizing any work for a company.
  • It is compatible with every Atlassian product.
  • It sometimes faces performance lack.
  • Takes the huge amount of space, as a result, takes time to load as well.
  • Some integration features are difficult to figure out and take time to get comfortable.
We are allowed to use Confluence to write anything and can write too much about the product. Team members can access the same information and make changes. No more wasted time trying to find feedback trapped in your email or chat thread. It uses a structured hierarchy and a powerful search engine to find work quickly and easily.
Holly Wallace Nielsen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Confluence across our organization. We all work remotely so it is a place where we can collaborate on projects, we post our meeting agendas, we post tutorials, training, etc. Any content that employees need to access to do their jobs we put on Confluence. For example, we can put processes on how to complete certain tasks on confluence and we also task each other to complete certain items.
  • Organizing content so that people can find what they are looking for.
  • Putting restrictions on certain pages so that it can be seen/edited by appropriate employees
  • Letting people collaborate on documents simultaneously
  • notifying when a page has been updated
  • combining content with tasks so that things get done
  • The tables feature is horrible. Really hard to edit, and make look nice. I end of just posting screen shots of excel.
  • It can be confusing and overwhelming for new users. I would not say it is intuitive.
It works well for remote teams that need to communicate and keep track of many projects happening all at once. It keeps everything all in one place so that everyone can find things and we all know where stuff should go. If you are tracking KPIs using complicated formulas in excel, you will find it annoying to try and replicate that in confluence.
Jarod Bonino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is being used at my organization to track action items, high level requirements, and decisions that are made in meetings.
  • It's easy to tag other Confluence users on questions and action items - which generates alerts to them
  • The formatting of pages in Confluence is fairly easy to control and change to meet the needs of a particular page
  • The tool set, in general, is fairly approachable and intuitive
  • Most of the tools my organization uses are controlled with a "single sign-on". Confluence, unfortunately, is not, but to be honest that might not be due to a limitation of Confluence. I don't know enough about the inner workings and available features to know for sure.
It's a decent generic tool for keeping track of group decisions and action items. I don't know that it is any better or worse than other similarly purposed tools that I've used though - such as OneNote.
Michael Gaylord | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is used by the whole company as a repository for managing and storing business information. It is a central repository for information that we all use on a daily basis to record ideas, communicate and coordinate product releases and manage business requirements for our development process. We also use Confluence as a way for the tech team to communicate with the business and marketing departments in the company.
  • Full featured
  • Secure
  • JIRA integration
  • Confusing interface
  • Cumbersome workflow
  • Difficult to orientate yourself when creating pages
Confluence is well suited to large to medium-sized, fragmented companies that are working on multiple complex projects. Less optimal for small teams that have smaller projects because of the amount of bloat. It is also more suited for teams that require a large level of inter-team communication around technical requirements.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Up until recently, my only interaction with Confluence was through clients that used it. I would typically access designs or mock ups within Confluence. Internally, we have used Jira for a long time, but always used other tools for project asset organization/reference. We made the move to Confluence within the last couple of months in order to make things easier to between project management and asset organization as Confluence and Jira work directly with one another.
  • Organizes and stores project assets, especially development/stage/build credentials across many different projects
  • Links with Jira quite seamlessly
  • So far it has ben relatively easy to find different types of assets across different projects as compared to our previous tools
  • Onboarding was not very intuitive
  • I am still unsure how to use the calendar feature
  • The "popular" feature doesn't fit my needs as I am consistently jumping across projects and really don't care what is popular.
Confluence is ideal if your organization already uses Jira as the two work seamlessly together, although I am still new to cross over and haven't figured out all the linking capabilities yet. Confluence seems to fit well within organizations that need to share numerous assets, and thoughts around those assets, across large project teams in order to streamline project management.
Alexandria Alvarez Gerbasi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atlassian Confluence is being used as a knowledge base for our entire organization. The software enables our staff to share knowledge easily, across our different offices around the world. We have created different sections of the knowledge base, so each department has their own "area" if you will on the platform, where staff from each department can post relevant information company-wide. This avoids the redundancy of emails and creates a database of company information, as well as shared knowledge.
  • Atlassian Confluence organizes documents well. This is a strength in my opinion as our staff can search for documentation easily.
  • Atlassian Confluence also allows for various people to edit the same document. This helps with collaboration.
  • Atlassian Confluence has many products that can plug into the Confluence platform. We have various products that all work together and enable different functionality for our users.
  • Atlassian is not intuitive for the user. Several of our staff who have not received training on the platform find that it is not user-friendly.
  • Posting on Atlassian can also take more time than expected due to the plethora of options available.
  • Atlassian Confluence does not always look the same in different internet browsers. In talking with a co-worker, he told me it works best on Chrome. My computer has IE and Chrome, so I have to be sure I am using Chrome when I log into Confluence.
Atlassian Confluence is well suited for a knowledge base, where an organization can post their important documents and allow for collaboration among colleagues. It is also very good for storing documentation and disseminating information. The platform might be less appropriate to store generic company documents or anything that is not proprietary.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We (stake managers who write stories for the development team) use it for creating the backlog for the development team and the development team uses it for managing sprints. The interface is very intuitive, so even users with no experience or knowledge of the process can easily understand it. Confluence helps us prioritize different development tasks from the business and revenue standpoint and we can also track how successful our dev team was in each sprint, which makes estimation of the following sprits easier.
  • Dashboard with backlog of dev tasks. Prioritization becomes just a matter of drugging items in the list and assigning points to each task. Super easy.
  • Sprint reports are also very helpful, they allow us to estimate how successful was our last sprint and what should be changed to successfully finish next sprint on time.
  • Cards for writing user stories are very intuitive and even people from production department, with no technical knowledge whatsoever can write a story.
  • Integrations with major calendars (Google, Apple, Outlook etc.) would be a good idea.
  • No other issues.
I think it's great for any project, as it helps to structure and streamline the process. Maybe the only scenario where it wouldn't be as appropriate would be a big art team with a lot of images and other art assets that they would need to collaborate on.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is used as a wiki in our backend when multiple users need to see information or [to] update pages.
  • Links right in from Jira
  • Easy to update pages and add information
  • Contacts you when others have made changes to certain pages
  • Feels like you're in Jira but it actually leaves Jira. Would be nice if you could move back and forth easily instead of using the browser back button
  • It's simplistic and I think they should keep it that way instead of complicating things
Good team board for text functionality and sharing of information. Maybe not so much for creating a good looking knowledge base or team board.
Daniel Blazquez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At my current company different teams have some freedom to choose organizational tools as they see fit. I have used Confluence for the most part of the year, as part of a new product development engagement in the software engineering department of one of our consumer brands. In this particular project it is used as an agile communication and collaborative documentation tool.
  • Larger teams working in complex projects
  • Cross functional communication with multiple departments
  • General usability
  • Smaller projects might suffer from a large overhead due to the particularities of the tool
  • It was not easy for me to liberate the data (export it to my computer)
Based on what I have seen, large teams (10+ people) working on complex projects (100s of requirements) with many types of "media" files (renders, engineering schemes, drawings, etc) will benefit the most from Confluence. I was impressed by the powerful tools to manipulate "non-text" files, and to adapt the content to different screens and devices. On the other hand, smaller projects will experience a significant "tool overhead" due to the (relative) complexity of the tool. A significant factor will be how handy are the team admins, as they might become bottlenecks to run the sites (configure flows, create sub-sites, etc).
Gil Lopez CTS ING | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atlassian Confluence has been instrumental in documenting the evolution in our business practice in a wide variety of topics. We use it to disseminate information ranging from HR, to technical knowledge sharing, to procedural administration. Associates of all levels use it to share, learn, publish and research as well. The front end is easy to use and the customization abilities allow for a professional look that is appealing to readers and contributes to a positive user experience (UX).
  • Searching for subjects or topics is easy and yield accurate and relevant results that can be tracked to their origin. This is important when researching a subject back to its origin.
  • Authoring capabilities are comprehensive, allowing users to produce from single scripts to full-fledged manuals with graphics and active content.
  • Integration with other tools is very useful to maintain a unified platform, consistent throughout the enterprise.
  • Customization features allow for branding and personal touches.
  • The ability to add reminders or expiration dates to topics would be a welcome feature. It is easy to forget about temporary items that stay in the system forever.
  • A quick-start tutorial in the form of video would be nice for those that want to jump into producing quickly.
  • An auto-start feature when logging in to the workstation would be a nice feature to get users quickly on board.
Confluence is great for documenting internal processes that are part of the on-boarding process of new hires. The document is used by the trainer and can be accessed by the trainee at a later date to refresh their knowledge on the subject. The same process is very useful to observe the evolution of a training program and edit as needed for improvements or lessons learned.
January 12, 2018

Get Work Done Together

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is being used in our organization across marketing, sales, enablement and the executive team. It is currently being used as a data repository for marketing materials and sales enablement materials. It serves as a place where my team members can add in work, comment on documents, and collaborate as a team. When new hires come on board, Confluence provides a history of the projects and the work that has already been done.
  • Collaboration tool - best way for teams to collaborate on upcoming projects or previous projects that have already been done. Great for people that come on board.
  • Shared calendar - lets you see when people have time off scheduled as well as deadlines, and it can all be color coded.
  • Integration - integrates very well with Jira, Google, Slack.
  • Cost - there are tons of add-ons that are costly and not included in the main package when you purchase the software. like the calendar and other tools which should be native functionality.
  • Updates - are very much behind the times. There is a lacking in the product functionality that is very common with other collaboration tools.
  • customization - this can be very hard if multiple departments are using the same instance. typically you have to run with the same customization across the entire organization.
Finding the actual documents you want can be very challenging. This could be the way we have set up Confluence in our instance but it requires a lot of scrolling; [there's]not much of a search ability and is pretty tedious to get documents and files updated.
Sean Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Confluence to support internal documentation needs. It provides a version controlled, access manageable, configurable repository of knowledge and documentation for the company. It facilitates indexing and search of the document database for quick access to information. We use it globally in the organization as a clearinghouse of information on everything from technical procedures to organization charting.
  • WYSIWYG editing of content
  • Rich text formatting capabilities
  • Search and indexing of content
  • Sometimes search is overly inclusive or doesn't appear to be contextual, eg I may search for a keyword used frequently in a particular document, yet it appears lower in search results than others that use it less often.
  • Limiting searches, for example by business unit or time, can be clumsy or awkward to use.
  • Performance/speed.
Confluence makes it relatively easy to produce richly formatted documents for an organization. By making it easy, Confluence takes away many of the barriers individuals might find for not documenting procedures, etc. The key to success with Confluence is to configure an organizational structure efficiently from the outset. It becomes more difficult to change or reorganize once something is established, and can lead to poor search results of a fragmented document store.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For years, our organization was using a mix of Word documents on a file server and files in SharePoint, none of which were synchronized, most were out of date and nobody knew where to look for any one document. Enter Confluence. We were able to migrate all of our old documentation to Confluence where it's easily managed, searched, and updated. The live-edit feature is especially great as we're building system documentation or pulling together meeting minutes. We started with a pilot program of one department to see how efficiently it works but have since rolled it out the enterprise as our standardized documentation tool. Every department and project can now easily update, review, and publish documentation in a securely, and centrally accessible tool. It's the perfect combination of a document repository and wiki site.
  • Live-editing. This was a key component for us as some of our teams were used to using Google Docs specifically for this feature.
  • Site-wide searching. The search tool is fantastic and does search document contents so it's not just metadata that is being queried.
  • Tie-in with other Atlassian products. We use JIRA for task and project management and being able to link Confluence pages to JIRA tickets or have JIRA Service Desk use Confluence as a Help Desk Knowledge Base for simple Tier 0 support was a key selling point for us.
  • Out-of-the-box templates. While you can definitely define your own templates for pages, the OOTB templates provided are sufficient for 90% of what we need. Meaning that documentation is standardized and simple for our users to create new pages or content.
  • Pricing. As with all Atlassian products, the demo pricing of $10 is great. However, the hop to the next pricing tier can be hard to justify without a strong business case.
  • No folder support. Unlike SharePoint, there are no folders to organize documents under. This is a feature as the hierarchy is meant to be flexible, similar to a wiki site. Migrating from SharePoint or a file server on the other hand is a bit laborious.
  • Consistency across Atlassian Suite. Each Atlassian product has their own version of the system settings, which as an administrator of multiple products, makes it a bit of a headache to remember where Confluence keeps their SMTP settings, versus where JIRA keeps theirs, etc. Thankfully we have a Confluence page to document the differences.
  • OOTB features. Counterintuitive to my pluses, there are some major features that are lacking out-of-the-box. There is a marketplace to find add-ons, and using the RestAPI you can easily build your own if you have the time and expertise in-house, but it would be great if some features, like a reporting dashboard for JIRA, were built-in OOTB.
As a collaborative, wiki style tool, it excels above most other products I've tried. The live-editing feature, plus the simple page-level security settings, document preview support, and a number of other features really make it an awesome tool for the job. Where it doesn't quite excel is if you need a strict document repository. Due to the licensing and pricing, you'd be better off using SharePoint or another lower-cost-per-user tool. Confluence's strength is with the understanding that these documents and pages are live and regularly updated. Not static documents that are updated once a year or so.
Bobbejo Kohler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company was always ok at documenting, but not consistent and we did not have a place to collaborate and share. This meant that documents were being created multiple times and in silos. With Confluence we have become better at documentation and sharing information. We also took time to plan out how we wanted our spaces to flow and what information belong where. For example, instead of every department having their own set of documents we found that having a client space and a landing page per client gave us a streamlined approach to organize.
  • If you use JIRA then having Confluence is a no brainier. The out of the box integration is worth the money!
  • There is no need to check in / check out documents. Live editing makes collaboration easy.
  • Reduces the need to email meeting notes and have multiple people save copies locally.
  • Confluence table functions could be improved.
  • The email notifications that are sent when a watched page is changed could be improved to highlight the changes better.
  • There is no easy way to see all comments in a view.
Confluence is perfect for meeting notes, design documents, lessons learned, policies and procedures. I would not use Confluence for items that need to be tracked through a workflow or where time needs to be captured.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is being used across our entire organization as an information hub. It creates a shared space that all departments can access. Previously, it was difficult to find one central space to share files, meeting notes, and general information. Additionally, departments were hiding information in places that other departments couldn't necessarily access so it was hard to find information across departments. Now, we have a centralized location where information lives and that the whole company can efficiently access.
  • Connecting to other applications including Google Drive and Slack.
  • Providing macros that allow users to create pages that meet specific design/format criteria.
  • Updating users when other users make changes or mention them on a page.
  • They recently changed the interface and it's not as intuitive or easy to use as the former UI.
  • When issues arise, it's difficult to understand what the issue is or what's wrong. Sometimes it's even difficult to explain the problem to customer support so that they can accurately address the issue.
  • Needs to be a way to limit updates (via email or via Slack) to only be crucial updates.
I don't think Confluence works well with assigning out tasks—not as well as other applications, at least. I also think it could have a better method for actually storing/attaching documents instead of just linking them out to Google Drive or other document sources. Confluence works very well for meeting notes, I must say. Prior to use, we rarely shared meeting notes OR we shared them in a long, confusing string of emails.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is used throughout the organization. We use it as a documentation repository, for everything from software designs, to customer contact information, to public-facing company documents, to holding the recorded videos of meetings. Confluence allows us to organize the documentation for all of the various groups in the company and to collaborate on designs for our products.
  • Provides tools to quickly and easily author simple documents.
  • Provides inline review tools for documents.
  • Provides @mention capability for people in the organization to draw attention to specific issues
  • Search capability is basic at best
  • There's little to no real ability to make documents look pretty
  • Multi-user collaboration on a single document is primitive. Something more of the order of Google Docs is more appropriate.
Suited:
- Review and comment on documents produced by a single user
- Repository of 'accepted' documents and processes
- Basic documentation

Unsuited
- Multi user collaborative content creation
- Non-basic formatted docs
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is used by our organization to collect process documentation, general knowledge, build notes, WebEx and PowerPoint presentations, programming notes and so on. It's a great way to gather a bunch of loose data under one umbrella. It's also integrated really well with JIRA and makes hopping back and forth simple and efficient.
  • Integration with JIRA
  • Allows for customization
  • Attractive and simple interface
  • Easy to learn and use
  • Large community of users to draw tips from
  • Poor document editing
  • Documents organization is not intuitive
  • The interface is attractive but could allow for more customization of fonts and colors, etc
Great for collecting documentation, less so for organizing and creating documentation. The learning curve is easy to surmount and there's a fair amount of flexibility for layouts but less so for beautification.
Yaron Lavi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Confluence is used to collect all knowledge articles, meeting notes, ideas worth sharing and so on. We also use it a lot to generally describe new features, collect feedback and refine the general spec of the feature before taking it into action. It helps a lot, mainly in centralizing all the "scattered" information in the company under one, simple, framework.
  • Very simple and intuitive user interface.
  • Very easy to go ahead and start writing, very low "learning curve", really fun.
  • No need for a different authoring tool, compile and publish cycles. Simply edit and save and voila!
  • It makes documenting stuff a breeze, and really fun!
  • Good import/export functionality to Word, PDF.
  • Editing features are quite simplistic and limited. Would love to see more font styles, color selectors, and themes.
  • It's not clear how to make confluence a public web site documentation tool.
  • No built-in support for placing and showing presentations from the tool. Instead of attaching a PowerPoint presentation, I'd like to prepare pages as slides and show them from the tool. Either an add-on is needed for that, or not supported at all.
[It's] very good for knowledge base articles, how-to stuff, ideas, and feedback. It will dramatically reduce the number of documents running around across the company and centralize intellectual property in one place - which is great.

It is less good when it comes to document management where it lacks functionality - as it aims to be a content management and not document management system.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence was used by the entire organization to track product development for a team using agile scrum methodology. It was used solely for this purpose, although I've previously used Confluence for Kanban, support ticket tracking, and wiki/documentation.
  • Confluence tries to provide a lot of team collaboration features under one cohesive product, and it succeeds in giving the user an integrated experience throughout its product(s).
  • Confluence is highly configurable to suit different needs and processes a team may have for managing their work.
  • Confluence has a developer API which offers even further customization and automation possibilities.
  • Confluence as a whole is very resource intensive and runs extremely slowly. This was the main reason our team abandoned it as our scrum tracking solution.
  • The number of configuration options can cause the application to be confusing if you're wanting to tweak any of the defaults.
  • The relationship between Kanban, backlog and sprint views could be particularly counter-intuitive.
In a larger organization, performance/responsiveness may not be as big an issue, and may be a cost worth paying for a cohesive product that could be used company-wide. In order to attract smaller businesses, it would have to really optimize performance to feel "lean" enough to be worth using. For support ticket tracking, especially when integrated with HipChat, I found Confluence to be a powerful tool, but for agile/scrum there are better tools out there that are more specialized to accommodate the requirements of the process.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atlassian Confluence is used as a collaborative platform. Each department uses different functions according to their needs. I use it to create simple documents and to use the feature Gliffy.
  • Easy to create documents and the team has access
  • Control over privacy
  • Able to create diagrams and flows
  • The UI is not too intuitive
  • Every so often some error shows up
  • It is not easy to copy and paste previous work
It is well suited as a simple tool for document creation, and to share with other people with access to Atlassian. As opposed to other platforms, you can edit the documents directly without the need to download, edit, upload, and share. It is less appropriate when the needs are more complex and the UI is not intuitive.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Confluence as a multi-department digital planning tool. It also serves as a historical marker so we can easily see what was done and cross reference it with web traffic.
  • Straightforward and fairly easy to use the platform.
  • Lets you know when others on the team are accessing the same materials/files.
  • It is quite adaptable to our needs.
  • Unfortunately there are different levels of usability depending on the various web browsers for opening this tool.
  • Functionality is somewhat rigid such as for not being able to easily post screen shots or images for reference.
  • The most important issue is the lack of being able to copy rows or columns easily to move to other files. It is a flaw that will hopefully be fixed.
We use it for project mapping and planning of content for our organization. It can be used in several different scenarios for sharing and managing simple or complex projects.
Paul Chauvet | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Confluence is primarily used for our Information Technology staff, along with non-IT users that are heavily involved in our programming, development, and design processes. We use it for a few major categories:
  • Internal IT documentation and notes
  • Project/meeting notes, agendas
  • Collaboration between IT and many non-IT areas
A number of staff use the "Personal Space" feature for their less formalized notes, plans, etc.

We use it instead of Sharepoint or some other technologies we have access to as it provides a great and easy to use place to collaborate, keep notes, and keep organized.

Note: we did not use or attempt to use any integrations with Outlook, Google Hangouts, Gotomeeting/webex/etc., so any questions I answer saying Confluence does not have them isn't necessarily accurate (there is just no option on Trust Radius to say "don't know").
  • Confluence is incredibly easy to use - and is simple for both technical and non-technical staff to use. It is easy to create content, and edit existing content.
  • The template system makes it easy for people to keep to a consistent format for some tasks, and creating new templates is pretty easy.
  • The system is easy to update and administer. It requires very little time and resources, especially since the 4.x/5.x versions.
  • It integrates well with our multifactor authentication system (Duo).
  • It is still very annoying that Atlassian does not support MariaDB, the default MySQL database that is used by all major Linux distributions now. This is even more of an annoyance since there has been a case open since 2013 that they have given little or no response to: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-29060
  • The mobile site, at least on android isn't that great. Our staff uses it to get info while away from their computers, but never to edit/update content.
  • Some users have issues with navigating the system, primarily when they are more used to a lack of organization (i.e. files dumped in a single network share directory). A tutorial about how to organize content couldn't hurt - though it isn't a major issue.
  • Some functionality which should be (in my opinion) part of the core application is supplied by third-party commercial plugins (like Creately).
There really needs to be someone with a good sense for how content should be laid out and named working in each space. Without an initial content organizer of sorts, things get a bit chaotic.

It isn't just a replacement for a traditional network drive or Dropbox though - and users seeking something like that may have issues shifting culture in that direction.
Charlie Chauvin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We had been using an tool built in-house that we referred to as the Knowledge base. Each department had their section and pages in there that were constantly used for reference. The problem was it became out-dated quickly and it wasn't very intuitive to use. We were very happy with Atlassian's Jira product, so it was an easy sell because there are so many hidden gems, templates, etc. that they include. We transferred all of our information over. Then we started using it for storing additional team information and then we started using it to share and collaborate on documents. Now we each have our own space and use it quick frequently as a needed resource for all processes.
  • Confluence shows you recently updated documents by other team members.
  • Allows you to build multiple spaces for all your department or client needs.
  • Confluence has a lot of quick templates to add calendars, images, tables, grids, etc. once you figure out how to use it.
  • You can tag team members on a page if you want them to review or be notified if the page has been updated.
  • Confluence has a lot of features and it seems simple at its core, but it can take a while to get up to speed to find how/where all the helpful tools are.
  • Document collaboration is a little better on Google Docs where you can make in-line comments to the author so they know exactly what you are talking about.
  • Google Docs also lets you go back through the revision history so you can see what editor made which change. Confluence does not.
Confluence is great at keeping all of your team needs organized. You can drop in screen shots and create walk throughs for team members. You can drop in code examples. You can create multiple spaces to keep team or project information separate. It really is a superior tool and is the modern wiki for teams.
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