I have been dealing with Atlassian Confluence for approximately twelve to thirteen years.
The most valuable features of Atlassian Confluence are its overall document editing and ease of use. When comparing it to other solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint or other wiki tools, some are far ahead or far behind on ease of use when you start to edit and publish a document. That is the key thing, and then I can also build the structure of pages and easily manage these spaces and control access rights.
The impact of real-time collaborative editing on my team's project workflows is not particularly useful. It is handy when, for example, we are taking meeting minutes, as we can together modify and type in the minutes. However, in the normal case, such as when I have been using it for product documentation or requirement gathering, it is normally one person doing it at one time. It is a good feature, but it is not really at the top of my list.
What I would like to improve in the product is definitely the Jira integration. It is hard to tell which product is lagging or lacking because I can usually find a feature on the Marketplace if I am missing something. The Atlassian approach of keeping the base product really stable, simple, and easy to use is beneficial. I think that is a good comparison to IBM, where all possible features are built into the UI, making it super complex with so many buttons and options.
For additional features I would like to see in the future, I would improve the requirements management setup so that I can use Atlassian Confluence and Jira together in an efficient way. I would also build better status monitoring or more granularity on the actions that I can perform.
I have experience with Atlassian Confluence, and I have very little experience with Jira Portfolio, which I think never really took off, as I do not know any company using it. I have been using mostly Jira and a range of plugins and Atlassian Confluence.
Regarding customizable templates, I find that they are quite good now, especially in the cloud, as they have these product development templates and team templates. I should use them more, and I normally tell customers to take advantage of those. I can modify and create my own templates in Atlassian Confluence, and that is what we do quite a lot in our consultancy work.
Regarding analytics features, it just depends on the use. The pure analytics regarding who has been using what and when is not that useful. However, if you are in a regulated company, you can extend those with some plugins to get highly monitored and high-level analytics. I think it is good that they are extendable.
Concerning the integration capabilities of Atlassian Confluence with Jira, I find it surprisingly simple, meaning it does not really have powerful features in it, but it is easy to set up. When I know what I am doing, such as when I build a project status page, I need to include many Jira widgets or these macros in the page. Once I get that done, it is really handy, but I would say it is a little hard to use in the beginning to get some real benefit out of it. I would say it is lagging behind what we would consider a company such as Atlassian, which has been developing these two products for twenty years.
I would rate this review nine out of ten.