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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

(2107)

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
  • 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.
Chris Snelling, CFA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Jayant Rana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Holly Wallace Nielsen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Jarod Bonino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Alexandria Alvarez Gerbasi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Daniel Blazquez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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)
Gil Lopez CTS ING | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
January 12, 2018

Get Work Done Together

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Sean Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Bobbejo Kohler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Yaron Lavi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Paul Chauvet | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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).
Charlie Chauvin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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