Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for five years now. 

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.

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.

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

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

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. 

Our company is using Atlassian Confluence for all work related to documentation, calendars, notes, organization of processes, and workflows.

For example, if we have a new process, or we are updating a current process, we use Confluence Project and share it across the entire team. If we need to calendar a vacation, or an event, we use Confluence. The solution is also used to share best practices and release notes relating to the product.

The solution is valuable based on our company policy. It is easy to use. The interface is basic, with everything linkable. We also use JIRA, so Confluence can link any ticket or task from JIRA to be included on the Confluence page.

The way Atlassian Confluence handles tickets could be improved. This process should be easier, more flexible and more useable, such as the ease of creating a table. 

I have been working with Atlassian Confluence for two years.

The product is stable. 

Atlassian Confluence is a scalable tool. We use the solution across lots of teams, not only on-premise but through remote access. We currently have approximately 100 users in the organization. 

Anytime we need to update or add something, we reach out to our administration team. That team can contact the maintenance team for any attention required to fix and close the ticket in a short period of time.

The initial setup of Atlassian Confluence is straightforward. 

I would recommend Atlassian Confluence to anyone considering the implementation of the solution into their organization.

Overall, I would rate Confluence a seven out of 10.

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).

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.

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.

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.

We have been using Atlassian Confluence for approximately five years.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

We mainly use Confluence for our internal documentation work and to plan new features, design documents, and knowledge transfer documents. Most of the documentation work is done using Confluence. 

We have a separate Confluence space for our team, with public articles about our projects and how to set up our repositories, available for anyone to access. 

Additionally, we maintain private content within the team's Confluence space.

Confluence has significantly improved the productivity of our team. Previously, finding information required asking someone or searching through improperly organized resources. Now, all onboarding documents, knowledge transfer documents, and documents regarding features are within our Confluence space, making it easy to find information as needed.

Confluence is very easy to use and feature-packed. It allows us to design well-organized documents and offers valuable add-ons. Its integration capabilities enable direct linking of pull requests and certain issues across spaces, facilitating easy navigation and enhanced collaborative work.

The discoverability of documents could be improved. In scenarios where documents are managed by another department or we are looking for specific documents, the process could be enhanced for easier discovery.

We have been working with Confluence for about a year.

Confluence is stable, and we haven't experienced any disruptions with their service.

We have not escalated any questions to technical support.

Positive

Before Confluence, we predominantly used SharePoint and Microsoft products. We decided to switch to Confluence as we were already using Jira and Bitbucket, making the transition to Confluence seamless with other Atlassian products.

Properly use the features available in Confluence, such as site spaces and other functionalities.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Confluence is an important tool for collaboration.

We can implement macros in documents. It is useful for document development. We can collaborate with others. The user management and role-based access management depend on Jira. All Atlassian products rely on Jira on-premise. We can also delete the number of users who can access our documents. Document collaboration is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

Indentation and other basic word processing styles must be improved. However, it is limited to editing HTML.

The tool is stable.

The tool can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The setup is straightforward. We have to follow several steps for Linux, but the setup for Windows is quite basic.

I did the deployment myself.

I strongly recommend the product. There is no need for scalability. The product’s collaboration features are very strong. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I use it for documentation, project reports, and creating a knowledge base. 

It's used for building a knowledge base and providing status updates on tasks.

I don't see many features in the version we use. We do find the ability to build workflow diagrams helpful, but that might be through external modules/plugins.

The diagram tool is a positive addition.

However, the only integration we use is with Jira.

There is room for improvement in maybe the tree structure for articles. If you have a lot of articles, it becomes difficult to navigate. 

Having the ability to control which articles appear in the main tree structure and only linking or hyperlinking to others within specific articles could be an improvement.

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

It seems highly scalable. There are 500 end users using this solution. 

We have IT, service desk agents, and regular users across different functions. Everyone is using it. For example, if someone needs to look up documentation or assistance with workflows, they would use Confluence.

It's used alongside Jira. Each team would likely have a Jira code for that purpose.

I've used ClickUp. It's a good tool, especially compared to Jira. Confluence still has room to improve in comparison. We also used a legacy tool called CBQ.

ClickUp is becoming a real competitor to Jira and Confluence because it's an all-in-one tool. You don't need separate licenses for project management and knowledge bases. ClickUp has a more seamless experience.  

I've heard of Asana, but I personally prefer ClickUp. If I were starting a company from scratch, I would consider ClickUp over Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc. It's really user-friendly.

I would recommend using this solution. It's not necessarily better than tools like Asana, but it gets the job done.

Jira and Confluence have strong market presence, and migrating existing systems can be a challenge. 

For new projects, I would certainly recommend considering other options. For established teams, switching tools might not be practical. But if you're starting fresh, explore alternatives and don't just default to Jira and Confluence.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We are a banking institution and use this solution to provide the key technical and functional documentation of the project that we share with our users. I'm the managing partner and we are customers of Atlassian.

The product is quite intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a lot of freedom when drafting directly online, and there are some very nice features to connect with JIRA, for instance. It's helpful that the solution enables documentation of user histories that you are following or tracking in JIRA and links the two. 

The performance could be improved, we sometimes run into difficulties creating tables. 

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is very stable, we've never had a problem. 

The solution is very easy to scale, especially because it's easy to interface with other applications. In my project at the bank we have over 100 users; my client has thousands of users. 

I've never directly contacted Atlassian support because we have our internal IT department. If I have an issue, I raise an internal ticket via ServiceNow and the administrators of the bank take care of things. If necessary, they contact the vendor.

I'm not an administrator but I believe the initial setup is relatively simple. From a user perspective, you can very easily create a dashboard, quick links, and things like that.

This is a very easy cloud-based solution that permits collaborative drafting of documents. We can have several people editing documentation at the same time which simplifies things. It's a good solution for technical and functional documentation.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use Atlassian Confluence for project documentation. It works as a repository of documents. We can write documents, including tutorial information, technical manuals, and other company procedures.

The product has a valuable feature for quick verification of documents.

There could be an option to collaborate with other users while editing the documents. We have to wait for other users to edit and release the document to make further changes or updates.

We have been using Atlassian Confluence for one and a half years.

The product is very stable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

We have 125 Atlassian Confluence users in our organization. We use the tool every day. I rate its scalability a seven out of ten. The lack of a collaboration feature affects the scalability level.

I have used SharePoint before.

I rate Atlassian Confluence a six out of ten. I advise others to look for other tools if they want a feature for collaboration.

I use Confluence to organize my data. In the case of Confluence, I use it to handle various transactions in the bank. We have multiple channels in the bank. The bank I work for is one of the largest in Brazil.

I manage five different channels in the bank. I receive messages, put them in a pipeline, and then process the data in various ways. After that, I distribute the processed data through different channels. I also have other tasks related to client management.

For example, I have to connect my legacy systems with new solutions, and Confluence helps me with that. I use different connectors to transfer data from legacy systems to new core solutions.

For me, the most valuable feature is its high performance. It's crucial for us in the bank, as we handle a massive number of transactions every day. It's very efficient and saves a lot of time.

Additionally, the ease of use and the availability of different connectors are important. They help me connect with various databases and facilitate integrations with different solutions.

I have a couple of different pipelines that I work with. However, I'd like to see them displayed differently on the same dashboard. So, I would like to have a unified dashboard to view the different pipelines.

In my case, the governance aspect is the most important. It doesn't work well with a huge company, and it's not as effective as it could be for software developers.

Moreover, there is an area of improvement in the governance functionality within Confluence, especially for large companies like ours, to have a more sophisticated governance solution associated with Confluence.

I have been using it for six months. I am using both Confluence SaaS solutions. I have access to various versions of the software.

It is very stable solution. 

I would rate the scalability high. 

The customer service and support team was not so good. In Brazil, the technical support for Confluence is not very good because the team is small. We are still trying to improve, but there are a lot of open permissions on the internet. However, Confluence is a very important tool and has good features. So, it's important to have better support because it can make it easier for users to work with Confluence. Currently, it's not as close as other brands, which makes it hard to propose new ideas or get prompt assistance. There are a lot of opportunities to make it more user-friendly.

The initial setup was complex.

In my opinion, it's worth the investment. I saw an ROI in a short time.

The pricing is good. In my opinion, there are no better alternatives.

I would definitely recommend using this solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use the database for documentation and requirement gathering. So, we document those and create plans or backlogs.

I have actually not used the solution much. I have only used the solution to create pages, and I also used it to document certain requirements.

The interface is good. Usability-wise, the solution is not great. However, I can adjust, and I can work on it.

The solution's user experience needs to be improved. The solution is not very user-friendly. From my perspective, it should be more user-friendly.

In the future, the solution should be able to integrate with other tools. I think it is integrated only with Jira. But there are other tools with which it could also be integrated. We should be able to integrate this tool to get a trace of what information we are gathering. Maybe it is only possible for Jira because it is a Jira product.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for around a year.

The solution's stability is fine. It automatically saves the data. We don't lose any data even if we don't save it manually. So that way, if something happens to the system, it drops and shuts down, and the data is automatically saved. I rate its stability a nine out of ten.

I didn't face any issues with the scalability. It was very good. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

I have not contacted customer support yet as I have not experienced any issues with the solution. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I don't have any experience with other products. I have used Azure DevOps, but I have not used too many products in this category other than Confluence.

The initial setup was straightforward and not too complex. I rate the setup a seven out of ten. I think the solution was previously deployed on-prem, but now, I think it is on the cloud. I also do not have an idea of how long it took to deploy Atlassian Confluence, as it was done by the backend team and not us.

I don't have an idea about pricing. But I can say that I think it's a good tool for requirement gathering, where you can create backlogs and store or document the data.

The solution may need a web build access code so that it can be used from anywhere. So, once you have access, you can access it from anywhere. And the scalability is also good. So, I can rate the overall product an eight out of ten.