Atlassian Confluence OverviewUNIXBusinessApplication

Atlassian Confluence is the #1 ranked solution in top Enterprise Social Software, #1 ranked solution in top Knowledge Management Software, and #2 ranked solution in top Corporate Portals. PeerSpot users give Atlassian Confluence an average rating of 8.0 out of 10. Atlassian Confluence is most commonly compared to Microsoft Teams: Atlassian Confluence vs Microsoft Teams. Atlassian Confluence is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 59% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 16% of all views.
Atlassian Confluence Buyer's Guide

Download the Atlassian Confluence Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: March 2023

What is Atlassian Confluence?

Project management is easy with Atlassian's Confluence as your single source of truth. It integrates with JIRA so you can easily add context to your projects in one central location. Create and track issues & product requirements, publish release reports, track release progress, and more when you connect Confluence and JIRA. Confluence allows you to create, share, evolve, and capture your team's project documentation so you can collaborate better, smarter, and as a team.

Confluence also organizes your powerful repository of information, opinions, and knowledge to help you answer questions, create how-to docs, and possibly identify the next big thing. Logical and consistent management of knowledge and a powerful search engine ensure that you can always find the right content, when you need it most. Share, organize, and discover content all in one platform.

Confluence has multiple deployment options to provide the flexibility your organization needs.

Cloud is a fully hosted service for customers who want to iterate quickly and have us take care of managing the infrastructure.

For customers who need to run our applications behind their firewall, we have Server and Data Center options. Server delivers greater capacity for a larger user base and gives you more control, allowing you to remain compliant with your enterprise IT, security, IP and privacy policies. For our largest customers, Data Center provides all the capability of our Server option, along with high availability, instant scalability and performance at scale.

Atlassian also offers premium support and strategic services for enterprise customers. Technical Account Managers are cross-functional technical advisors providing proactive planning and strategic guidance across your organization. Premier Support goes above and beyond our standard offerings to give you account-wide support from a team of senior support engineers.

Atlassian Confluence was previously known as Confluence.

Atlassian Confluence Customers

Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.

Atlassian Confluence Video

Atlassian Confluence Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Atlassian Confluence pricing:
  • "The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive."
  • "To my knowledge, Atlassian Confluence had a pricing approach which is a commercial open-source solution, so that if you are a company, you had to pay an amount. This fee was not huge compared to other traditional solutions, and it was free for personal use or if you were an individual."
  • "There are some cases where you can go on Confluence as a public site without a license, but you will not have all of the features. You can also have a Confluence site that does not require a license just to read the articles. When you have Jira Service Management attached to Confluence, then you can go through the portal of Jira Service Management and read the Confluence articles without the license. This is good because when you are in an ITSM environment, you have many customers, and you do not want them to have to pay just to read articles. Regarding the use of the full features of Confluence, there is a license cost, and it depends on how many users you want."
  • "Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything."
  • Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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    Enterprise Architect, CISSP at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Top 5Leaderboard
    Good usability, helpful community support, and facilitates well-structured documentation
    Pros and Cons
    • "It has a very intuitive user interface, which every user able to manage the basic functionality of a PC will be able to work with and produce quite satisfactory results."
    • "Atlassian should rethink its withdrawal of the self-hosted version of the product. They only offer cloud-based service or the "datacenter-edition", which is quite expensive for small companies and private users."

    What is our primary use case?

    I primarily used this solution for IT documentation and documenting ISMS based on ISO 27001.

    With the Confluence Wiki, I implemented quite a series of successful IT and Security Documentation projects. Confluence was my preferred product when starting any collaboration project that had to produce comprehensive, centrally organized, and highly usable documentation.

    I worked on several projects that implemented an ISMS, based on the ISO 27001 standard, which mandates a "documented ISMS". I introduced Confluence as the tool to be used for that documentation.

    I used Confluence as the "self-hosted" server in VMs or on MiniPCs running Linux. I always added backup methods, so the HA functionality of the much more expensive "datacenter-edition" was never needed. The largest environment I worked in had 100+ active authors, but typically I would work with the 10- or 25-user license, which are both quite affordable even for small customers and where the server resources are manageable (From two to four virtual cores and 4-16GB RAM will do fine).

    How has it helped my organization?

    This solution worked fine until Atlassian decided to force everybody into the cloud.

    The most mentionable improvement is that documentation with Confluence gains a much better structure. Instead of hundreds of .doc and .xls files roaming the network shares and C: drives of team members, once you get Confluence set up, spend a few hours with all designated authors to define a few guidelines on how pages should look, be interlinked, and how to generally use the tool, the productiveness of creating and improving documentation is phenomenal!

    The key is to take the mentioned few hours, get everybody together and produce a "style guide", for want of a better word, about how to use Confluence. Then agree on the top-level structure of your documentation and if everybody accepts this and uses it in their work, all is fine.

    My recommendation is to meet for an hour every other week with those who work the most with the tool and fine-tune said "style guide" and the structure. This will help everybody to keep being motivated and to produce the best results. Also in such meetings, ideas about add-ons can be discussed and their integration planned.

    What is most valuable?

    Atlassian Confluence is a very good and seasoned Wiki Solution.

    First and foremost, I want to mention its top-notch usability. It has a very intuitive user interface, which every user able to manage the basic functionality of a PC will be able to work with and produce quite satisfactory results.

    There is a big and responsive community to help with questions and so far, Atlassian is still doing a good job to help.

    Also, there are add-ons from various sources, which can be integrated with the product quite easily and have good chances to function together as a whole, like intended.

    Another thing worth mentioning is the very good import and export functionality. You can just use Copy-Paste on a website or a document and Confluence will in most cases manage to reproduce the content quite recognizably. Export not only as XML, to be able to reimport, but also, PDF and Word DOCX work quite well. They can be further improved, speaking from personal experience with PDF files, by adding a few add-ons for formatting, page heading, and such.

    Oh, and last but not least the flexibility should be mentioned. If for any reason there is the need to change the structure of the contents, say to move a branch of pages from one top-level area to another, just copy them or export them and re-import them in their own area. Mostly, that works without a glitch (exceptions prove the rule) and even cross-area-links will continue to work. For more complicated restructuring, one can always use the XML-Export and load it into an XML-Editor. Of course, that´s for people who can read and understand XML structure.

    What needs improvement?

    Atlassian should rethink its withdrawal of the self-hosted version of the product. They only offer cloud-based service or the "datacenter-edition", which is quite expensive for small companies and private users.

    I have been using and recommending Atlassian Confluence for more than four years now, and never had to regret it until the end of 2020, when they suddenly got this cloud madness.

    Not only does the cloud version come nowhere near the responsiveness of the self-hosted version (which is a matter of course, as self-hosted servers are within the LAN with single-digit milliseconds of round trip time, whereas cloud-hosted servers will always have 20+ ms), but also it requires a customer to entrust their data to a third party, which is in many cases a no-go.

    The only way out would be to buy the "datacenter edition" and thus spend a whole lot more money on the product. This may be what Atlassian intended in the first place and if so, shame on them.

    With that, I will no longer recommend the product, as I am opposed to the cloud-first hype. Our data should be our own and we should be free to decide where we store them.

    Buyer's Guide
    Atlassian Confluence
    March 2023
    Learn what your peers think about Atlassian Confluence. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We have been using Atlassian Confluence for approximately five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    No complaints that I know of - unless some admin shoots the underlying VM (has been heard to happen), confluence is just rock-solid. To be sure: It needs some resources, and if the VM starves of memory or CPU, performance and stability will suffer.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    As I said, the largest environment i was working with at a customer has 100+ authors and I imagine plenty of pages and other content - sadly I do not know the exact figures - but we never had reason to complain in our project which only consisted of 12 people actively using Confluence. So I guess scalability should not be an issue.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    Prior to Confluence, I tried working with Microsoft SharePoint. Well, there were those sad tries, and my advice is to forget it.

    SharePoint may have advantages when it comes to organize and share files, but the ease and intuitive way to create structured documentation just is not there.

    And as a sidenote: When working on projects we would oftentimes edit a page in confluence with three or four of us concurrently updating table entries or text segments. Very seldom have I experienced problems with allowing concurrent edits and in my mind never incorrect merging of inputs. Again, that is true for the on-premises self-hosted version, in the cloud that does not work quite as well.

    And why do I point this out: Have any of you tried to edit a word document in MS Teams concurrently? ... it produces quite funny effects but in my opinion cannot be trusted, really.

    How was the initial setup?

    The cases where I set up the server myself were straightforward and went without any glitch along the documented steps.

    What about the implementation team?

    Up until now I only had inhouse admins implement the servers, they did it noiselessly and with satisfying results.

    What was our ROI?

    Erm. ROI. Hm. Can anybody please call the finance guy? ...

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    Well, that´s difficult now. Until the end of 2020, using a self-hosted server, have one of your IT-Admins set it up, costs $10 a year for the 10-Author license.

    Nowadays? Don´t use it. The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    To be honest, after being introduced to Confluence by a colleague all those years ago, I did not evaluate any other option in earnest.

    Recently, I started looking at Tiki Wiki, which is a fully OpenSource alternative, but I haven´t gotten around to installing it or using it in a new project.

    I would not consider alternatives but for the policy of Atlassian. Such a good product should run in every datacenter. NOT in the Clouds, though.

    What other advice do I have?

    My advice for everybody is to flame Atlassian into re-providing the self-hosted server version!

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Massimo Banzi - PeerSpot reviewer
    Standards Manager at Telecom Italia
    Real User
    Flexible, efficient, allows the concurrent development of documentation and lets you add comments offline
    Pros and Cons
    • "What's most valuable to me in Atlassian Confluence is that it allows the concurrent development of documentation. I also like how you can add comments offline and implement changes directly on the document."
    • "An area for improvement in Atlassian Confluence is encouraging more vital interaction among the project members or users involved. I was researching a tool that could be used for better interactions offline among users on a specific topic or discussion. That feature would make Atlassian Confluence better."

    What is our primary use case?

    I'm working on a project in a Standards organization that's using Atlassian Confluence as a tool for collaboration.

    The organization integrates Atlassian Confluence with another Atlassian product called Jira for the concurrent development of documentation for the project. Jira is used to raise issues you implement and trace back to Atlassian Confluence for collaborative development.

    My organization primarily uses Atlassian Confluence for the collaborative development of projects. The organization has plenty of projects in development, and there's a space in Atlassian Confluence for sharing documentation, raising issues, producing documentation directly on the tool, and exporting documents using some filters my organization developed because the final document is in Word format.

    What is most valuable?

    What's most valuable to me in Atlassian Confluence is that it allows the concurrent development of documentation. I also like how you can add comments offline and implement changes directly on the document. Atlassian Confluence is a very nice platform for my purposes. It's a good tool.

    What needs improvement?

    An area for improvement in Atlassian Confluence is encouraging more vital interaction among the project members or users involved. I was researching a tool, but I forgot the exact name of the tool, and that tool could be used for better interactions offline among users on a specific topic, development, or discussion. I want that feature to be present in Atlassian Confluence. If there's a possibility to integrate Atlassian Confluence, Jira, and that other tool, that will make Atlassian Confluence better.

    My team had problems accessing Atlassian Confluence a couple of times, but I wonder if that was due to a network, server, or tool issue. I have to say that I've been working with Atlassian Confluence for years, and it has been improving its functionalities, so I feel that as a tool, it's working very well, but some features could still be improved.

    For example, the search engine should allow you to define some keywords you could use when searching, though I wonder if it's staff-related or setup-related, or lacking in the search engine function itself.

    I also want artificial intelligence added to Atlassian Confluence where you're working on a specific issue or argument, and Atlassian Confluence, through its AI, can propose some improvements based on what has been done on the same topic by different teams or different projects within the same infrastructure, similar to an internal reference, which can be helpful. Through AI, it would also be great if Atlassian Confluence could advise you on what has been done outside your specific project, and maybe there's the possibility of an installation where you have several projects installed and working together.

    Another feature that would be good to have in the next release of Atlassian Confluence is the tool recognizing a keyword or two that's fully developed in project B, which you can use in project A, for example.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using Atlassian Confluence for many years, though I don't remember exactly when I started. I've been using Jira far longer, even in my previous organization, then I moved to my current organization, which uses Atlassian Confluence integrated with Jira.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Atlassian Confluence is a stable tool.

    How was the initial setup?

    The initial setup for Atlassian Confluence isn't easy. It would be best if you had some time to understand how to approach the tool entirely, but it doesn't take up so much time. Atlassian Confluence has many features, which is why it's normal if it's a little bit complex, though Jira is even more complex.

    Atlassian Confluence is similar to Jira because it takes more than five minutes to create dashboards and tickets, for example. It also takes time to involve the team and understand Atlassian Confluence and its functionalities. Though the tool is flexible enough to start using it without complete knowledge, the more you use it and get more involved with it, the better you can understand Atlassian Confluence and use all features it provides better.

    I'm not aware of how long it took for the tool to be implemented because it was handled by a different team, though I believe the team in charge customized Atlassian Confluence with the help of some experts or third parties.

    What about the implementation team?

    An in-house team implemented Atlassian Confluence with the help of third-party experts.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    To my knowledge, Atlassian Confluence had a pricing approach which is a commercial open-source solution, so that if you are a company, you had to pay an amount. This fee was not huge compared to other traditional solutions, and it was free for personal use or if you were an individual. I'm unsure if Atlassian is implementing the same pricing approach for Atlassian Confluence nowadays.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    I evaluated Microsoft Teams in my previous organization, but I found Atlassian Confluence far more flexible and useful than Microsoft Teams. There is no space for comparing Microsoft Teams and Atlassian Confluence because Atlassian Confluence is undoubtedly more effective and efficient, in my opinion.

    What other advice do I have?

    I remember that I'm using the latest version of Atlassian Confluence.

    To my knowledge, maintenance of Atlassian Confluence is handled internally, and the organization also pays a team from Atlassian to do maintenance.

    Thousands of people use Atlassian Confluence, but I cannot give the exact number because my organization has thirty to forty projects developed concurrently, with at least ten to twelve people periodically working on it, then some active and not-so-active people using Atlassian Confluence. Thousands of people use Atlassian Confluence, particularly for the write mode, document production, etc.

    My advice to people who want to implement the tool is not to renounce it if they find difficulties initially because you can start using it from scratch with the basic functionalities. Then, when you discover other functionalities within Atlassian Confluence that can be useful, you can explore those at best.

    I'm still determining exactly how much customization my organization has done in the tool and if that's relevant. I'm uncertain if it's different if your tool has the standard features versus the highly customized version of Atlassian Confluence. 

    Still, it's undoubtedly a good tool for collaboration, including remote collaboration. I can work with people in China and the States without any problem, and you can quickly identify any changes you or other users make. This is precisely why Atlassian Confluence is recommended for remote collaboration.

    My rating for Atlassian Confluence is eight out of ten.

    My organization is a user of Atlassian Confluence.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    Flag as inappropriate
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Atlassian Confluence
    March 2023
    Learn what your peers think about Atlassian Confluence. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Quality Assurance Team Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
    Real User
    The solution has definitely improved our organization
    Pros and Cons
    • "We have found limiting permissions and history very valuable."
    • "The roadmap feature should be made easier to work with and modify. It's not really scalable."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use the solution for all kinds of documentation that are part of the testing, product, and development phases and for taking meeting notes. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    Atlassian Confluence has definitely improved our organization. Before Confluence, we only had documentation on JIRA. Now, the requirements are routinely documented. We use the solution for test planning and documentation-related testing. It is also extremely useful for technical documentation. You can create different spaces for the different teams. Atlassian Confluence has helped the company a lot.

    What is most valuable?

    We have found limiting permissions and history very valuable. History tracking is good, and so is commenting and tagging somebody when commenting. Other valuable features include linking Confluence and JIRA and having a Confluence cloud on Slack. The roadmap feature in Confluence is very good.

    What needs improvement?

    The comparing history versions feature could be improved. It's messy and not useful. I remember that it was much better initially. 

    The roadmap feature should be made easier to work with and modify. It's not really scalable. Confluence is hard to work with as well. Specifically, you cannot set the dates or choose shorter periods of time, like one day or two days. It looks a bit messy. I kept getting questions about it, so I added a note advising people not to pay too much attention to the inaccurate dates.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We've been using this solution for more than two years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The product has really great performance. There are no issues with that at all.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The team more than doubled in the last couple of years, and we didn't have any issues with scalability. It was very smooth.

    How are customer service and support?

    I never had any problems, so I never had any experience with customer service and support, and I don't believe anybody did, or they would've shared it on the channel. 

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We previously used JIRA, but it didn't work because the tickets became old, and it wasn't easy to tag where the documentation was. So that's why we switched to Confluence.

    There were no other options on the table before we went for Confluence because I wasn't on the committee that selected it. But using JIRA as an adapting product probably made the team choose Confluence faster. And some of the team had used it before. I had used a very simple version around five years before. So I had some experience with it. Of course, in five years, the tool had changed a lot.

    What was our ROI?

    Our ROI is more like something that helps us save money and share knowledge when onboarding new people or introducing existing employees to new processes, products and services and planning, but it doesn't really generate revenue. You could say that our ROI from this product is a monetary and quality-of-life improvement.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would rate Confluence eight on a scale of one to 10.

    I'm not sure whether all our applications are available on the same cloud. But one of the clouds we use is AWS. And since the product is on the cloud, we don't usually have any issues. You don't need to maintain it or make backups because you can contact the cloud provider and ask for whatever backup you need if anything is lost.

    I never encountered any problem with the solution that required help from support. So I never reported any issue to management, and I don't believe anybody else did, or it would've been shared on the channel. 

    It took us some time to benefit from Confluence because we had to create a documentation process, which meant adopting a document mindset to get into the habit of documenting, which was a real challenge. At first, we allocated around two hours a day for documenting, which didn't work. But as the QA team grew, we started documenting their processes, which greatly benefited us. We don't benefit much from the dev documentation, but the product and the QA team do. Though it took us a while to get into that state.

    I would say we use about 60 percent of the product's features 

    We currently have more than 30 people using Confluence in our company.

    My advice to anyone thinking about using or implementing Confluence is to start small and use it more and more as you get used to it. Start using it as part of your process. It's very important not to dedicate all your resources to it. Start bit by bit, and you'll benefit from it the most. That's how your employees get used to it. Start incorporating it into their processes, but don't enforce it, or it won't work properly. Like everything in life, you have to start small, and as you get used to it, you'll know exactly what you want from it and the best way to get it.

    Pioneering team members should start using Confluence, showcasing how it benefits the company. They should encourage colleagues and peers to use it. First users should also add articles and documentation so others can use the tool more easily. Without this encouragement, team members will completely ignore the tool, and it will be put down as lost expenses that didn't benefit the company.

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    Flag as inappropriate
    PeerSpot user
    Hina Tufail - PeerSpot reviewer
    Senior Atlassian Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
    Real User
    Top 10
    Is easy to set up, easy to use and understand, and is a great wiki
    Pros and Cons
    • "The templates are a valuable feature. You can make templates. There is a space inside where you can create pages. When you use the template, the page auto-generates text and images. You do not have to think about the structure of your page as well, which I think is a very good thing for a user. Because usually when you're in front of a blank page, it can be a bit dreadful to know where to start."
    • "Some macros can be technical, and they are better managed on the Confluence cloud rather than on-premises. For example, when you add an image on the cloud, you can resize it just by using the mouse. This is not the case on-premises yet. You have to write pixels of the size of the image sometimes. Some of the very old macros are still there, and some of them are technical. It can be hard for users if they are not from an IT background to understand how to use them quickly."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for our knowledge base and also for internal blogging.

    What is most valuable?

    The templates are a valuable feature. You can make templates. There is a space inside where you can create pages. When you use the template, the page auto-generates text and images. You do not have to think about the structure of your page as well, which I think is a very good thing for a user. Because usually when you're in front of a blank page, it can be a bit dreadful to know where to start.

    What needs improvement?

    Some macros can be technical, and they are better managed on the Confluence cloud rather than on-premises. For example, when you add an image on the cloud, you can resize it just by using the mouse. This is not the case on-premises yet. You have to write pixels of the size of the image sometimes.

    Some of the very old macros are still there, and some of them are technical. It can be hard for users if they are not from an IT background to understand how to use them quickly.

    There's a feature that is really helpful that I like, but it is inside the cloud version and not in the on-premises version. It is the inline comment in edit mode. In fact, you can do inline comments on articles and pages on both the cloud and on-premises versions, but when you modify the page on the cloud, you can still see them but in edit mode. When you edit the page, you cannot see them anymore. You need to have two tabs in order to remember what the comments were.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using it for four years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Stability wise, Confluence is a reliable tool, and as a wiki, it's a good tool. So, there are no known performance issues.

    With regard to Confluence on-premises, the performance would obviously depend on the infrastructure and the hardware behind the installation. So, it won't really be linked to the tool.

    On the cloud side, the stability is okay as well.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Confluence is scalable on both the cloud and server data center. On the cloud, you can even go up to 10,000 users, which was not the case three or four years ago.

    We have nearly 300 users. We do our assignment reports on it, and some use it in sales. Managed services staff use it to share information with clients. It is used by everyone.

    How was the initial setup?

    The installation is easy, and there's nothing more to do after the installation. It can be ready to use very quickly.

    Deployment would probably take a day or two at the most. However, if the client needs advice regarding the structure of the company and how to do the knowledge base, then it can take several days. Usually, this is up to the organization, but as it's really quick to use, you can create whatever you want the day after the installation.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    There are some cases where you can go on Confluence as a public site without a license, but you will not have all of the features. You can also have a Confluence site that does not require a license just to read the articles.

    When you have Jira Service Management attached to Confluence, then you can go through the portal of Jira Service Management and read the Confluence articles without the license. This is good because when you are in an ITSM environment, you have many customers, and you do not want them to have to pay just to read articles.

    Regarding the use of the full features of Confluence, there is a license cost, and it depends on how many users you want.

    What other advice do I have?

    You should use Atlassian Confluence, but you should not expect it to behave like a document manager. People do ask me what the advantage of Confluence is compared to that of SharePoint, but in fact, this is not the same use case. SharePoint is for storing documents at a place, and Confluence is a wiki.

    I would recommend that you go for it but you will need to remember that it's a wiki and is not designed to store documents. It can store documents, but only up to a certain size. Also, it's not meant to be used to store documents.

    If you are looking to deploy your organization or your projects inside Confluence, do think about the right structure because it will influence the way your people use it. Think about how to deploy the structure of your projects or your documents inside the Confluence, and do not expect it to be a document manager.

    On a scale from one to ten, I would give Atlassian Confluence an eight because it's a great tool. It's a great wiki and is easy to use. It's easy to understand how to use it as well, particularly if you are from an IT background. Someone who is not from an IT background might need some help in the beginning on how to use it. The setup is really easy, and you do not need specific skills to deploy it. However, the comment feature and macros need improvement. It would be nice to have more templates in the future.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
    Flag as inappropriate
    PeerSpot user
    Human Resources Executive at Sticky IO
    Real User
    Top 5Leaderboard
    A solution that is straightforward to set up and has good scalability, but needs a more flexible pricing model
    Pros and Cons
    • "The solution helped us to see where we were going wrong and where we were doing good, and that helped us to make proper decisions"
    • "There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model."

    What is our primary use case?

    We were developing an eCommerce platform and wanted to capture all of the metrics that were coming across. We chose Confluent, which is a ready-to-use solution. The use case was to track all of the traffic that was coming from across the globe, and create metrics out of it.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We used the solution for monitoring and alerting. It was purely for internal processes so we could monitor the status of services and see if something was happening, like an order not getting through, or the customer dropping, or a problem within the system itself. The ability to capture those kind of metrics helped the business.

    What needs improvement?

    The solution does have tons of features, but sometimes we don't want every feature to be there, we just want a basic solution. They don't offer the option to customize the package, so you get everything with the one bundle price. Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything. There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I used this solution for about a year as an integrator for a previous program.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Overall, we had a good experience with this solution. I'm pretty satisfied because we were able to quickly achieve what we wanted to do.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The scalability of the solution is pretty good. I would rate the scalability as a seven or eight out of nine. 

    How are customer service and support?

    The solution has good support.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We used open source Kafka or other solutions where you can deploy the open source version in your infrastructure and you don't have to pay anything, but you have to manage the solution by yourself.

    How was the initial setup?

    The initial setup was straightforward and quick. 

    What about the implementation team?

    We used CodeFish for deployment. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The pricing depends on traffic, like how much input and output is happening and how many messages you're handling. For example, you have a bundle package that has a limit. If you go beyond that, there's a different price attached to it, but if you are within that limit, it's a fixed price.

    What other advice do I have?

    Overall, the solution helped us to see where we were going wrong and where we were doing good, and that helped us to make proper decisions.

    Confluent is a very good product, but only if you are using it to the fullest. If you want to use all the features offered by Confluent, there's no competitor for that, but if you're only looking for basic capabilities, then I wouldn't suggest Confluent. MSK has less capability as compared to Confluent, but since we were not using all of the capabilities, MSK is cheaper for me because I just want the basic features.

    Confluent is a classic product. There's no doubt that they're leading the market and their offerings are excellent. I would rate them as a nine out of ten.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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    Styliana Araouzou - PeerSpot reviewer
    Senior Operations Analyst at Etoro
    Real User
    Top 5Leaderboard
    Great version control with an easy initial setup and lots of plugins
    Pros and Cons
    • "The initial setup is very easy."
    • "The product is considered expensive."

    What is our primary use case?

    We're using Confluence as a document management solution. Confluence includes all our documents internally in the company in regards to policies or how to document or about business requirement documents. Therefore, it's a document management system for us.

    What is most valuable?

    Confluence can give you the possibility of installing plugins to meet your different needs and you can cover all your needs. Most of them are free to install.

    The initial setup is very easy.

    What needs improvement?

    Due to the fact that there are so many diverse plugins available, the solution really isn't missing any features. 

    The product is considered expensive. 

    In the future, I would like to be able to copy from other documents, local documents on your PC, and paste them into Confluence pages while keeping the formatting. At the moment, you can copy and paste, however, all your formatting disappears. This is one of the features that I would want. 

    In terms of the feature for uploading documents, at the moment, when you want to upload documents from your local PC into Confluence, you can do it. However, when you want to make updates on your document, you need to download it from Confluence, make the changes in the document, and then upload it again. Instead of doing this, instead of downloading the document from Confluence, it's better to have the possibility to make your changes in Confluence and open the document in Confluence instead of downloading everything.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using the solution for four years. It's been a while now. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It's stable. It's a really stable product. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We have 50 people on the solution and we have no plans to increase usage. I can't, therefore, really speak to the scalability potential.

    How are customer service and support?

    I've never had to reach out to technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

    How was the initial setup?

    I found the implementation process to be simple and straightforward. It's not complex at all. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    I don't handle the licensing aspects of the product. I'm unsure as to the exact costs. It's my understanding, however, that it is an expensive product. On a scale from one to five, where one is cheap and five is expensive, I'd rate it at a three and a half. 

    What other advice do I have?

    We're a customer and an end-user.

    I'm not sure which version of the solution I am using at this time. 

    I'd advise new users to not be scared, to play with anything on it, or create documents and delete documents. It keeps tracking the item version. It keeps a version history so that you can revert all your changes back. Never be scared to play with Confluence.

    I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's an easy tool to use. It gives you the possibility to integrate it with JIRA. All your documents and business documents can be connected to JIRA. With the versioning available in Confluence, history versioning, if you delete something, you can always find it. If someone changes anything in the document, you can find it from the history. It's a really good product.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Joseph Tharakan - PeerSpot reviewer
    Application Architect at Allianz Insurance
    Real User
    Top 10
    Valuable integration with Jira and auditing capabilities that effectively manage documentation, but lacks support for Markdown and adding code
    Pros and Cons
    • "We value the way we can tag documentation to Jira because we can cross-reference a Jira ticket to a Confluence page, and we can also add a Confluence page to a Jira ticket."
    • "I think the couple of improvement areas would be around Markdown support and support for adding code."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use this solution for documentation purposes. It's very tightly integrated with Jira, so we handle project management with Jira and document management with Confluence.

    What is most valuable?

    We value the way we can tag documentation to Jira because we can cross-reference a Jira ticket to a Confluence page, and we can also add a Confluence page to a Jira ticket. The way both work together helps us to reduce the duplication of the codes, and if we need to have documentation, we describe it in Confluence and tag the page in the Jira ticket for someone to work on, which reduces the duplication of work.

    On each page, we can see the different version updates that have already been done by colleagues. It's auditable, which helps us to figure out what changes have been done at what point. Documentation with an auditing capability helps us to manage the overall documentation effectively.

    What needs improvement?

    Nowadays, the standard for documentation for developers is mostly in Markdown, so pretty much everything we can do is in the Markdown language. The support for Confluence to import something that's in Markdown is not that great. Sometimes it's also not that great when it comes to including code snippets or similar things, so I think the couple of improvement areas would be around Markdown support and support for adding code.

    As for added features, I would like to see more flexibility in the way we can design a workflow in Confluence, and maybe some templates that we can use based on the purpose of the document. 

    I would also like to see more integration with other common application services. Other than draw.io, there is not much integration to other services like Lucidchart or similar services, which are helpful for reporting your documentation with drawings and architecture diagrams. Those improvements would make it a bit more user-friendly.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using this solution for five years now. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The stability partly depends upon the resources that you allocate for the solution, but it's pretty much been stable for the last couple of years that I've been working with it.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The solution is scalable and it's centrally controlled, and we have a couple of central responsibility roles for adding new users. It's helpful for us on the backend because if we want to provide access to different sets of people, some may need edit access, some may need read-only access, and we utilize those different permissions.

    How are customer service and support?

    Other than utilizing the public documentation that is available, I haven't reached out to the support team.

    How was the initial setup?

    I was not very involved in the setup of Confluence, but my understanding is that it was not that difficult.

    What other advice do I have?

    Confluence might be a burden to small and medium companies, like startups, so I probably would not recommend it to them, but I would definitely recommend it for companies at the enterprise level.

    I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten because we found it helpful. It's good if you are in need of long-term documentation of projects, both on the functional side and the technical side, but at the same time, it needs some improvements, like more integration to other solutions. 

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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    EmanMasalmeh - PeerSpot reviewer
    Agile Coach at Majid Al Futtaim
    Real User
    Top 10
    Great reports and search functionality with good reliability
    Pros and Cons
    • "I love the reports and the Confluence board."
    • "The UX is a little bit all over the place."

    What is our primary use case?

    The company needed a tool that project managers put their plans, documentation, and everything related to project management into, including milestones that are not available on Jira. They have to use both this and Jira in order to give a full report to management.

    How has it helped my organization?

    When you're working with Agile, you can't go through from one sprint to another without having a good burndown chart. 

    What is most valuable?

    I love the reports and the Confluence board. 

    The search functionality is great. 

    For me, the initial setup is easy. 

    The solution is scalable.

    It's a stable product. 

    What needs improvement?

    I have a problem with the burndown chart, for example, if I put a time only on the estimation block, it'll not show on the burndown chart. It has to be the points.

    I'd like to see better reporting.

    The UX is a little bit all over the place. From my experience, people really find it very hard to cope with Jira when they start using that.

    The setup could be streamlined further. 

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've used the solution for about 12 years. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The stability is great. There are no bugs or glitches. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The product scales well. 

    We started at 100 users and have since scaled to 300 users. We will continue to increase usage. 

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We previously used a local tool. We needed something better for handling project management. 

    How was the initial setup?

    The implementation process is easy for me. People sometimes find it easy and yet there is room for improvement in the process. 

    We advised a third party on how our workflows needed to be implemented and they implemented them on the cloud. Then they moved the project to our cloud and set it as a base for everything there. It was actually really smooth. It didn't take too much time.

    The full implementation strategy took two months. 

    There was a little bit of complication from the bank side. We have a lot of security, unblocked IPS, et cetera. The two months weren't the full implementation time. We had areas that were blocked due to our security control. A couple of times we remained blocked for one week. I want to say the ideal time for the implementation was one month and a week. For us, of course, it took longer. 

    We had five people in total ding the deployment. There were three from our side and two from the third party. 

    I'd rate the entire process a three out of five in terms of the ease of implementation. 

    We have a contract for handling maintenance. The vendor partners are handling it. 

    What about the implementation team?

    A third-party handled the implementation process. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. 

    What other advice do I have?

    We are users and work directly with a vendor partner. 

    We are using the latest version of the solution. 

    I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I love Confluence. I'd recommend it to other users. People should try it out. It would be very helpful. 

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Private Cloud

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Other
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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