Atlassian Confluence - An easy-to-use, powerful tool for Organizations of any size
March 24, 2015

Atlassian Confluence - An easy-to-use, powerful tool for Organizations of any size

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

5.6.5

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence

Confluence is used within our organization as a project management collaboration tool and as a method for making important documentation available to business stakeholders. As we continue establishing our agile project management methodology, Confluence (in concert with Atlassian JIRA), is quickly becoming our trusted ally. Our technical and business users both rely on it for sharing information.
  • Compared to other tools of its type, Confluence seems to have a very low barrier to entry for all types of users. Everyone from low level users to the most technical developers seem to learn the software quickly and effectively.
  • Despite its out of the box simplicity, Confluence is quite extensible. Between Custom Macros, External Gadgets, and 3rd Party Add-ons, you can extend Confluence to meet most of your business needs, whatever they may be.
  • Confluence's integration with Atlassian JIRA means that you can track the entire lifespan of a project, even before it actually becomes a project. Use the Questions add-on to gather feedback from the business on project ideas, allow your team to brainstorm on possible solutions, and then track development all the way up through QA and release.
  • One particular problem we've experienced is the lack of an ability to collaborate on Excel documents. To do this, you must download an Excel attachment, make your changes, and then re-upload it creating a new version. Due to the overhead involved in this, we often find ourselves using SharePoint for this task. It's certainly not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice if there was an add-on which allowed in-app editing of Excel worksheets.
  • I've observed that users who mainly work on a stack of Microsoft applications often have a more difficult time learning applications outside of that realm. The overall feel of Confluence is very un-Microsoft, which might make adoption a bit slower/harder.
  • Confluence has made it easier to share important project information between our project stakeholders at both the IT and business levels.
  • Confluence serves as a very searchable repository of knowledge for our project teams.
Having now experience with either Atlassin Confluence or Microsoft Sharepoint, I found that Confluence was much easier to learn from both an administration and a content build-out perspective. This opinion seems to hold true for most users. From a user's perspective, Confluence takes the cake. I find that users are much more likely to find content in Confluence than they are in SharePoint. This could be due to many different factors, though the result hold true either way.
If you are looking for an easy to use, extensible application capable of serving many different purposes for your organization, I would highly recommend Confluence. From KB's, to collaboration, to Project Management Confluence can do it all.