Confluence - A jack of all trades collaboration tool
October 05, 2016
Confluence - A jack of all trades collaboration tool
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence
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.
- At a previous company, Confluence made creation and resolution of support tickets across a large and distributed organization very manageable. This was a major positive impact in that it allowed efficient management of many different customer deployments in a responsive manner.
- At my current company, Confluence would have had a negative impact do to the slowness of the product, adding a significant overhead for our small team to get things done.
- Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Huboard and Pivotal Tracker
Confluence was trying to be too much for our needs; we needed a scrum process management tool and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System turned out to have the exact set of features we needed.