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Atlassian Confluence is a versatile tool that organizations use to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. Users have found it to be …
Starting at $10 per month
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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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Popular Features
- Document collaboration (104)9.090%
- Access control (102)8.787%
- Notifications (107)8.282%
- Search (107)6.868%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
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
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
Features
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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.
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 Integrations
Confluence Competitors
- Microsoft Yammer
- Microsoft SharePoint
- OpenText Vibe
- Socialtext (discontinued)
- Traction TeamPage
- HCL Notes
- OpenText Enterprise Content Manamagement (ECM)
Confluence Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
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.
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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(2104)
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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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
(1-4 of 4)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Confluence has been our standard company tool for years to capture, organize, share, and discover knowledge. Confluence is used by the entire company but enjoys high utilization with the technical software engineering teams. Confluence ensures that product architectures, partner integrations, and customer projects are fully and accurately documented. Confluence is also used externally to share common customer documentation, online help, and integration specifications to our product's platform. Confluence is the ideal tool for sharing structured and connected content both inside and outside of the company.
- Basic wiki features (connected content)
- Enterprise security and access control.
- Rich text editing.
- Support for code snippets and markup.
- A huge library of plug-ins
- Support for markdown is sorely missed by the modern software engineer.
- Better support for searching and discovery.
- Better support for collaborative editing of pages.
- Cloud hosting options.
- Content plug-ins
- Rich security models.
62%
6.2
86.66666666666666%
8.7
75%
7.5
- My organization manages content and knowledge much better.
- Confluence helps solves a lot of compliance issues and requirements that our company has in the Financial Technology services field.
- We are able to support our customers better and scale our business easier.
I really don't think that there are any legitimate competitors to Confluence. Open source solutions lack all of the enterprise robustness and plug-ins that our organization enjoys. The only closest competitor to Confluence in the commercial space is SharePoint, which has been adopted by many organizations and is difficult to deploy and use. For organizations like mine that do not rely on the Microsoft ecosystem, it isn't even considered an alternative. Every two years, I take a look at the marketplace, but always come up short in finding a competitor to this long-lived, reliable platform.
15
Confluence is manually used internally by our technical engineering and support staff. Confluence is great for sharing information regarding to our consulting projects and our internal product engineering projects. Both projects have lots of interconnected documentation, and this is where Confluence shines.
1
We have one person who spends about 10-20 hours per year supporting Confluence. We really do very little with it. We pretty much use all of the stock functionality which a good deal of success.
Becoming reliant on third-party plug-ins was never our goal with our confluence installation. We never wanted to become reliant on technology that we were never sure would be supported indefinitely.
- Documenting projects (requirements, stakeholders, meeting notes, documentation)
- Creating online help that is editable by anyone in the company.
- Creating external-facing customer documentation for our products.
- Confluence has a nice plug-in to build API documentation from your open API spec YAML files. Pretty cool!
- We have been using confluence to direct customers to all relevant information during customer onboarding. (works pretty well!)
- I'd love to see our internal company policies and HR information in Confluence. Seems like a no-brainer.
No
- Price
- Product Features
We adopted confluence when it was first released over 15 years ago!
At the time, the whole idea of wiki's were pretty new and your two options were to run and install MediaWiki (which is what Wikipedia was built on) or use Confluence. MediaWiki was free but it has two awful limitations - lack of security and lack of support for attachments.
Corporate wikis really require robust security features (which the earliest versions of confluence always had). Our organization also worked with a lot of documentation from partners and customers, so having good capabilities to support inline file attachments was important.
Confluence's price point was so low that I could easily get the expenditure approved with a small 6 person team. I could then show stakeholders in the company what a great solution it was to our internal documentation challenges.
An evaluation process today would be much more robust. We would be looking at the available products for a broader group of people (the entire company) as well a broader set of requirements. Our company is bigger and more complex than it was 15 years ago!
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Since we implemented the tool for an internal software product group initially (and we had NO good tools to replace), there was very little change management involved.
- Early, self-hosted versions of the software weren't always snappy and reliable (this was 15 years ago, mind you!)
- LDAP integration was a little clunky in very early versions of the software.
Our organization is pretty frugal and we are pretty much self-starters (plus we build software using the same technologies at Atlassian). We even still host our instance! If something goes wrong, we can easily support it. Eventually, I want to migrate our instance(s) to the Atlassian Cloud instance. We'll stick with standard support. Confluence is important, but we are only a small company with 40 people. We can get by even if the system was down for a day.
No
I cannot. I remember submitting some questions in the early days of the product, and the support staff was generally pretty helpful. But I haven't submitted an issue with support in over ten years!
- Creating richly formatted content pages that are connected to other pages.
- Uploading OpenAPI YAML files to create live API pages! (way cool!)
- Uploading content and displaying it in-line
- Copying and pasting formatted documents into wiki pages (formatting easily gets way screwed up)
Yes, but I don't use it
May 06, 2021
Robust Document Management System
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Atlassian Confluence as documentation/wiki for the entire organization. It addresses our need for a centralized document management system. We call it wiki/intranet.
- Version control of pages
- Transparent and easy for users to use with minimal training to non-technical staff
- Robust and reliable tool
- Self-hosted so we don't have to share data with anyone
- Performance can be improved
- Excel integration available without third-party add-on
- Version controlling
90%
9.0
90%
9.0
90%
9.0
- our staff loves wiki; we always hear positive from our staff using wiki.
2000
5
- Document management
- Blogging
- Centralized wiki
- Intranet
- Team calendar plugin
- Jira integration to generate automated reports
Yes
Arno
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
Availability of a developer from the vendor to develop things our organization needs. Atlassian Confluence doesn't have enough resources to fulfill the needs of each customer.
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was a major issue with the implementation
- Server config
- Proxy config
- HTTPS config
- Admin training
No, I'm not happy with Atlassian Confluence support at all.
Yes
Yes, so many times we reported issues but we didn't get the right response and had to explain as much every single time to support team. They try to pinpoint a third-party application by just looking at a random logging error.
No, never has this ever happened with me. I am waiting for this moment.
- User training material
- Online help
- Support
- Server performance
Yes, but I don't use it
March 07, 2017
Confluence - the one-stop-shop for collaboration tool!
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.
11.428571428571427%
1.1
53.75%
5.4
47.5%
4.8
- It helped us centralize our intellectual property in one place.
- It's easy to use interface help to bring people on board and share their stuff - which is usually very hard.
- It worked beautifully with JIRA, our work-management tool, so efficiency and visibility was greatly improved.
Other products evaluated: SharePoint, corporate-WIKI.
SharePoint has a clunky user interface, and the resulting websites look poor. It resulted in low acceptance from our users. WIKI was over-simplistic and had a lousy search engine. Confluence was selected because of its great UI, integration with JIRA, and the low effort needed to go ahead and start documenting and publishing. Also, the elaborated security engine with inherited permissions has a great value.
SharePoint has a clunky user interface, and the resulting websites look poor. It resulted in low acceptance from our users. WIKI was over-simplistic and had a lousy search engine. Confluence was selected because of its great UI, integration with JIRA, and the low effort needed to go ahead and start documenting and publishing. Also, the elaborated security engine with inherited permissions has a great value.
200
They cover the following:
- how-to articles
- meeting notes
- ideas sharing and feedback
- product high-level design and specs
2
Usually IT-related people, with knowledge on Linux servers, and with good inter-personal skills.
- How-to articles
- Documentation of products
- Meeting notes
- New ideas and high-level designs of solutions.
- The meeting notes templates are a great and simple way to document and collect info.
- It was a breeze to import existing documentation from a legacy system, either by copy-paste or import from MS-Word.
- Publish an on-line documentation
- Centralize all product documentation into one roof.
Yes
SharePoint, corporate-WIKI and and internal help site.
Confluence was easier to use and fun, centralized all info in one location, and was quickly and widely adopted. SharePoint was complex and has a clunky interface, and the result was uneven results and unattractive site. out internal proprietary help site was old, and no one updated it anymore. The corporate-WIKI was not adopted, I guess because it was over-simplistic and searching was really bad. Lastly, Confluence integrates beautifully with JIRA which we use for work item management.
Confluence was easier to use and fun, centralized all info in one location, and was quickly and widely adopted. SharePoint was complex and has a clunky interface, and the result was uneven results and unattractive site. out internal proprietary help site was old, and no one updated it anymore. The corporate-WIKI was not adopted, I guess because it was over-simplistic and searching was really bad. Lastly, Confluence integrates beautifully with JIRA which we use for work item management.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
Ease of use. Many similar tools failed because users find them complicated, clunky or the other way around - over simplistic. Confluence, in my opnion, offers the correct mixture of simplicity and power in a simple intuitive shell. It has only 2 views: browsing with a sidebar tree and the editor mode, which are quick to learn and explain. The zillion add-ons will allow further functionality should we require it.
No. Confluence is a great tool, simple yet powerful. The community at the Atlassian store proves it has a strong footprint, with great value.
No
because the documentation on the web is excellent, clear and simple. Most answers are there.
No
There was a time I had a page with inherited permissions, and I saw information. I wasn't sure it was displayed because of my current user, and that other user won't see. I've asked a question on the Atlassian forum and got an answer within 1 hour! And a correct one! This was amazing,Ii was really impressed.
- Editing pages
- Setting permissions, and inherited permissions
- Setting labels, to ease future searching
- Adding and activating an add-on could be simpler.
Yes
very nice, with a similar look and feel - although it may not fit small screens like mobiles, better with tablets.
June 04, 2014
Confluence Changed the Way I Work
Note that Confluence can be purchased from Atlassian as a downloadable version which is installed yourself, or as a service through Atlassian On-Demand. I deal exclusively with the downloadable version.
We are using Confluence across several units (in my organization this includes administrative departments as well as labs), but not across the entire organization at this time. We are expanding its use, chiefly among labs (which in many ways are self-contained).
For administrative departments, Confluence is used to encourage and strengthen collaboration both within a department and between departments. It provides an excellent way to document procedures and information and present it in a way that easily accessible to anyone.
For labs, it is used for lab procedures, testing methodologies, and certain research data. Privacy is important for each individual lab, so their Confluence spaces are not visible to anyone outside of their lab, unless explicitly requested.
We are using Confluence across several units (in my organization this includes administrative departments as well as labs), but not across the entire organization at this time. We are expanding its use, chiefly among labs (which in many ways are self-contained).
For administrative departments, Confluence is used to encourage and strengthen collaboration both within a department and between departments. It provides an excellent way to document procedures and information and present it in a way that easily accessible to anyone.
For labs, it is used for lab procedures, testing methodologies, and certain research data. Privacy is important for each individual lab, so their Confluence spaces are not visible to anyone outside of their lab, unless explicitly requested.
- Documentation of policies and procedures and information about key infrastructure.
- Collaboration on documents and data (including discussion about the information that is not part of the document itself).
- Discoverability of information -- all articles are indexed, taggable (labels), and searchable.
- Security -- fine-grained security is possible, and access-based enumeration makes it less likely that someone without permission to certain data will even be aware of its existence.
- Single Sign-on -- integration with LDAP (including Active Directory) and other SSO possibilities makes user administration easier and end-user login processes easier.
- Intuitiveness -- I've evaluated many wiki products and Confluence is by far the easiest to start using and continue using, both for technical and non-technical users.
- Upgrades -- for the most part, these go well but they can be challenging if you've done any customization to the programs files (which is required for certain basic things like SSL). Plugins are great for extending the functionality of Confluence but they add to upgrade headaches. (Does not apply to on-demand since upgrades are done by Atlassian)
- Migration paths (to Confluence) -- there is no official supported tool for this. The Universal Wiki Converter is an outdated and seemingly unmaintained tool that is tricky to use and in my experience barely viable if at all, so conversion from your existing wiki to Confluence may be best handled by a consultant who is very familiar with the process and its pitfalls. Of course if you're starting from scratch, this doesn't apply.
- Licensing is done in tiers, so you can't just add a handful or a certain number of users. If you have 100 users, and need a few more, you need to jump up to 500. The pricing is fair so for most companies this could be a non-issue, but in a small business it might force a tough decision about whether to expand to a number of users you'll never need (at significant cost increase) vs. not having enough licenses for everyone who needs one.
- Although there is a supported clusterable configuration, there are so many caveats and pitfalls to it that it's rare to see it done in production. As such, true high-availability is unlikely to be achieved, except maybe in On-Demand, though the SaaS version has many limitations itself.
- Much better communication between team members -- when you have to write for other people it makes you see things from an outside perspective.
- Less duplication of effort -- documentation on a task can be seen by other users and followed or improved.
- Reinforcing policies and procedures -- it allows us to make our workflows an iterative process naturally, without forgetting about previous requirements or constraints.
- Visibility -- a team member's activity can be seen by her peers and the team leader, so it gives the team a view of what everyone is working on without needing a formal meeting; it can allow someone to provide relevant information or feedback sooner.
- MediaWiki,MS SharePoint,TWiki,DokuWiki
Anyone who has made an edit on Wikipedia knows what it's like to use MediaWiki. I occasionally find an instance where I'm using it, but I don't use it often. I have done a conversion from MediaWiki to Confluence and it was painful.
TWiki and DokuWiki (along with others I don't remember anymore) were evaluated for a client of mine many years ago (they really wanted something free). Once we tried Confluence, those options were not in the running, and Confluence was the clear winner. It just felt right, whereas with all the others it felt like a struggle to use.
In my opinion Confluence blows SharePoint's wiki out of the water.
Confluence has a SharePoint connector, which provides some integration between SharePoint as a document management system and Confluence as a wiki. It seems promising, but I have not personally used I don't currently use SharePoint in production.
TWiki and DokuWiki (along with others I don't remember anymore) were evaluated for a client of mine many years ago (they really wanted something free). Once we tried Confluence, those options were not in the running, and Confluence was the clear winner. It just felt right, whereas with all the others it felt like a struggle to use.
In my opinion Confluence blows SharePoint's wiki out of the water.
Confluence has a SharePoint connector, which provides some integration between SharePoint as a document management system and Confluence as a wiki. It seems promising, but I have not personally used I don't currently use SharePoint in production.
No
Premium support, to my knowledge is not something you can buy for a single issue or for any license; it's an entirely different class of licenses called Enterprise Licensing that is only available/required at higher user tiers. I do not currently use any Confluence instances with enough users to require/allow for Enterprise licensing.
Yes
I did submit a bug regarding the use of Microsoft's JDBC driver for SQL server. It was not resolved to my liking in that their position was that the driver is unsupported, though I can't exactly fault them for not supporting a driver they do not test with. Support for that driver remains an open feature request (it doesn't have a lot of votes).
After escalating an issue, I was contacted by someone higher-up and worked with her to get much better support, and to provide feedback on the overall issues I've had with support in the past. I have not used their support in almost 2 years since I haven't needed it, so I can't comment on any improvements.
- Creating and editing pages is very easy. The editor is WYSIWYG so anyone can use it, but it also supports shortcuts for the more technical user who likes faster keyboard access to functions.
- Searching and finding content with the built-in search is very effective even when articles aren't created with labels, as all of the content is indexed.
- Collaboration with users via Activity Feeds, RSS, Comments on articles, sharing with other users, and @user tagging is very handy.
- Embedding media (photos, youtube videos, google maps, etc.) into pages can be done with drag and drop or cut and paste, seamlessly.
- Embedding interactive versions of some document types doesn't work very well (PDF, vector-based docs like Visio, etc.).
- Organizing pages into strict hierarchies is not something well-supported by Confluence. Pages can be organized in trees but the URLs do not show this information (this can be good if you want your URLs consistent as you move pages around). It also means that page titles are not relative to its parent(s), which means longer names that incorporate the names of the parents in order to unambiguously identify a page.
Yes
The mobile interface is sparse and it's read-only. This is just accessing the wiki through a mobile browser, not with a dedicated app. You could also use the desktop version of the web interface for full functionality (which is cumbersome if even possible on a small screen). Overall I feel mobile is not well-supported.