Confluence Reviews

It's not very user friendly, take advantage of the tutorials

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.

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 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

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)

Would like if it integrated into Office 365.

Navigation is a bit limited for exploring.

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.

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.

Flexibility with template uploads

PDF exports only render gadgets as links

Need better chat and phone support

JIRA Gadgets in Confluence don't function correctly

Diagram tool isn’t great

App isn’t great

Can load slowly

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.

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.

User management can be a bit hard, especially between different companies

The installation and configuration is not so simple

The product relies on the uptake of users (and strong QA processes) to ensure compliance.

Display bugs with large tables.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More snappy and responsive UI

More accurate search results

Better tools for approvals management

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.

More macros for customizing pages

Licensing is expensive is you want people to have edit privliges

Team Calendar plug in does not work well

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.

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.

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.