Item: Atlassian Confluence
Rating: 7
Author: Sean Patterson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In the past, we've used Confluence to store nearly everything: onboarding documentation links to resources, basic client details, new projects coming down the pipe. We've changed that approach to be more minimalistic and only use Confluence for a specific project or two since we can maintain that other information through other sources.

Pros and Cons

Integration with other Atlasssian projects.
Editor basics
Tools/extensions

Document organization
Overall navigation of system
Document formatting

Most Important Features

Integration
Price
Features

Return on Investment

Provided concise code/issue/documentation platform
Saved time
Saved resources

Alternatives Considered

Not in the product listings, but we've started using GitBooks for a lot of our Wiki/documentation-based needs. Compared to Confluence, it is a lot more lightweight and easily provides version history when edits need to be tracked. It doesn't have quite the file management/discussion capabilities like Confluence, but for lightweight documentation needs, it works better.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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?

Yes

Would you buy Atlassian Confluence again?

Other Software Used

GitLab

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're looking to build a tightly integrated suite of documentation, code management, and task management, Confluence will do a great job and serving the documentation piece of the puzzle. Through shortcode/actions, you can easily link in-work tickets and on the Jira side of things, you can easily point to documentation to help finish a task. We've done this on a couple of large projects with success. For a general Wiki, it may be a little bit too much infrastructure, and the system may cause you to create too many documents which leads to an organizational hassle.

A heavier Wiki platform, but good to integrate with other Atlassian systems

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence