Atlassian Confluence - Easy and Intuitive Knowledge Sharing
October 04, 2019

Atlassian Confluence - Easy and Intuitive Knowledge Sharing

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

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence

Atlassian Confluence is being used across my entire division to support knowledge management and communication across all aspects of software development. Our project managers use it for status reporting by leveraging its strong integration with JIRA, our software developers use it for technical documentation, decision logs, and cross-team collaboration. Our scrum masters use it for recording sprint ceremonies including retrospective details. I can't think of a single job function that doesn't use Confluence on a daily basis.

Pros

  • Atlassian Suite integration - As part of the Atlassian suite, Confluence makes it trivial to pull in information from other products in the suite, enabling easy linking to JIRA issues, Bitbucket pull requests, etc.
  • Confluence's In-Built Charts and reports make it really easy to construct detailed reports that clearly show the status of projects, defect backlogs, etc, in a digestible manner
  • Confluence's Permission model is very robust and enables you to allow and disallow access to certain areas of Confluence based on users and groups, making it easy to control sensitive information.

Cons

  • 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.
  • Confluence enables traceability from requirements to build, which has demonstrably improved our development processes as we have clear connection to all aspects of work done, throughout the development process.
  • Confluence has unified our communications to one platform for persistent knowledge management, rather than trying to manage information across multiple tools
  • At times, our organization favors using Confluence as a vehicle for communication, rather than having a quick meeting to discuss. We're getting better at addressing that, but it's something to keep in mind as you implement Confluence in your solution.
  • HCL Connections (formerly from IBM)
IBM Connections tried to be what Confluence IS - but failed miserably at it. As a knowledge management platform, it was terrible because information went in, but never came out. We used to have a saying that Connections is where information went to die simply because you could never find it again!

Confluence is better than Connections in every way, as it leverages its sister solutions in the suite for easy linking and access. Confluence search is excellent too, so its easy to find that page you're looking for.
This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.

Do you think Atlassian Confluence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Atlassian Confluence's feature set?

Yes

Did Atlassian Confluence live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Atlassian Confluence go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Atlassian Confluence again?

Yes

JIRA Software, Bitbucket, HCL Connections (formerly from IBM), Trello, 1Password, LastPass for Business, Evernote, OneNote, Webex Meetings, Remote Desktop Manager, VMware ESXi, vSphere, OneDrive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Pivotal Tracker
Atlassian Confluence is extremely well suited for capturing knowledge and sharing it with your organization. Whether that takes the form of blog posts, technical documentation, or project status reports, Confluence can handle it all. Anytime that written documentation with detail would be valuable to your organization, Atlassian Confluence is THE tool to use.

The only time I'd say that it is less suited for use is as a substitute for a face-to-face conversation. Sometimes people will use Atlassian Confluence as a communications vehicle when an in-person dialog would be much more expedient. Of course, you could always capture the output of that conversation as a Confluence page!

Confluence Feature Ratings

Project Management
8.3
Task Management
10
Workflow Automation
Not Rated
Mobile Access
6
Search
9
Visual planning tools
8
Communication
8.7
Notifications
10
Discussions
9
Internal knowledgebase
7
File Sharing & Management
10.0
Versioning
10
Video files
Not Rated
Audio files
Not Rated
Document collaboration
Not Rated
Access control
10
Advanced security features
Not Rated
Integrates with Google Drive
Not Rated
Device sync
Not Rated

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