Atlassian Confluence Reviews

I use Atlassian Confluence for all kinds of documentation purposes, such as sharing information about specifications among the group and distributing those documents for review remarks from others. It's a nice way of distributing information between different teams.

Atlassian Confluence's most valuable features are the ease in which you can use the tool, the flexibility in creating folder structures, receiving notifications in case others put remarks on the documents, and working together on documents.

Atlassian Confluence could improve how information is shared outside our company. We had some negative experiences with the rights we have with our information when sharing it within Atlassian Confluence and with other teams outside the company. It's due to the limitations on the rights we have on the export capabilities. We don't have sufficient rights to do so.

In an upcoming release, there should be improvements in the graphical support for drawings. We have some plugins, but it's limited for making drawings within Atlassian Confluence, it's rather difficult. Most of the time we create I create drawings outside Atlassian Confluence and import them as a file. It makes it a bit difficult to update drawings within the solution itself, but it's mostly limited to the plugin support we have internally.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for approximately five years.

Atlassian Confluence is a highly stable solution. We receive notifications from the vendor if there is maintenance work that is required. The overall stability is good.

The scalability of Atlassian Confluence is very good when I see how many people are using it. There could be up to 1,000 users using the solution. 

I have not needed to use the support from Atlassian Confluence.

The initial setup of Atlassian Confluence is straightforward. It's set up within the company and we ask to create workspaces for ourselves.

We have a site license for Atlassian Confluence and there are some limitations on external users.

I would recommend others to use these solutions. The ease of use and the very short learning curve, make it an ideal tool.

I rate Atlassian Confluence an eight out of ten.

The solution is very simple to collaborate among a large group of people. If you want to create a bit more compelling, nice-looking documents, then it's not ideal, but for the thing we are using it for, it's perfect.

It's the knowledge base for our company.

We have project spaces for our customer projects, and the project teams share information about the projects.

We also use it as a wiki for our company.

As for valuable features, the team management features help us to share information very easily.

Also, you can work with multiple people on one document inside the solution.

The scalability for larger companies could be improved.

Atlassian has decided to stop the server edition of Atlassian Confluence. In the future, you can only buy an enterprise installation called Data Center, and you have to pay for a thousand users on up. This means that it will be very expensive. So, small installations will only have the cloud option, but the cloud version of Atlassian Confluence is not as stable as the on-premises version.

It would be good to have more graphical components on dashboards to show table components as graphics, pie charts or bar charts. These are not included at the moment.

I've been using it for the last five years.

The stability of the on-premises version is really good.

The scalability is not so good, but it's enough for us because our company is small. We have 30 users. However, we have customers who have 10,000 people on Confluence, and then it becomes a problem.

I would rate technical support at three on a scale from one to five.

We chose Atlassian Confluence because it is really easy to set up the system and because of the functionality. The system has many good functions, and the UI is really modern and easy to use.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Less than one full-time employee is needed for the maintenance of this solution.

Pricing wise, it ends up being an expensive solution. In the beginning it's cheap, but by the time you have all the functions you need, it turns out to be expensive.

Use the 30 day test period to be sure that you want the system. You should use it and test it during this time and then decide.

At the moment, Atlassian Confluence is the best team product you can buy, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We are using a lot of Confluence. While we are gathering the requirements from the business for the development, Confluence is used. We are creating project charters there. It covers all the functional requirements including knowledge sharing sessions. Basically, when somebody's leaving or somebody is being hired, everything related to that goes on Confluence. This also includes information, for example, about annual leave information, et cetera. If a person is hired and we need to prepare a KT plan for that. So we prepare a page in Confluence.

We like that it is a complete knowledge base where anyone can go and search for various types of information. Different departments are using it. If I want to search for any information, instead of pulling it from files, we have just added everything on Confluence, which makes it easily searchable.

It's easy to use and you can create all types of pages. 

There are lots of functionalities. You can see statues, who is signed in or not, et cetera. 

When we import the data in Confluence from Word or any other document, the formatting is not correct. When we export the data, more or less, it is fine. Let's say from Confluence to Word or Confluence to PDF, it's okay. Otherwise, we face formatting issues.  

The solution would offer more importing features. 

We have used the solution for 15 years or so.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is great. If your workload grows, it can easily match it. 

We have 700 to 800 people using the solution right now in our organization. HR, production managers, and more are typically on the solution. Pretty much everyone uses it. 

I haven't had any interactions with technical support. I can't speak to how they are in terms of responsiveness.

My understanding is that the pricing is competitive. I'm not directly involved in the pricing and how it was done. That said, the fact that we have been using it for the last 15 years makes me assume it would be fine for our pocket and reasonably priced. I'd rate the pricing at a three out of five in terms of value for money.

Confluence basically is not a management software. It is just a knowledge base. You can search for whatever is there. You cannot manage a project using Confluence. For that, you would need Jira, not Confluence. 

I would recommend the product. Currently, most companies are using Word documents for creating all requirements. Probably they'll be putting those in, either on SharePoint or somewhere. However, these need to be preserved for the future. This solution helps with that.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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. 

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.

It is linked with the documentation tools. SourceSafe is very quick and a more stable tool, especially for online multi-usage. Microsoft Project Service is much worse from when I was using it 10 years ago, but I don't have recent experience with it. With Atlassian Confluence, maybe the user interface is poorer, but the use of it is much more dimensional and stable.

I like the documentation. It's a central platform, and there are many things that I can do with it. I'm very pleased about it.

I can put my workspace and tasks under related documentation. I can put it heuristically on the portal, so I can see everything and the comments, and the document, the outputs, and the coding links. I can put down all the photos and see all of the portfolio in one shot, as a summary.

The user interface could be improved.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for more than 10 years.

My personal experience is related to the R&D process, R&D funding process issues, and R&D funding projects. I'm responsible for project management, program management, or department-related IT consultancy and also software development project teams. For the last 10 years, I have also been responsible for R&D project management and all of the process management of R&D centers, so government and funding organizations' process.

We are just analyzing many programs to enhance our project management tools, agile management and agile projects.

We have been using the JIRA platform recently, and tools for documentation and some custom internal tools that departments have just developed for us.

The solution is stable.

I don't know how scalable it is, but it's enough for 10 or 20 partners of companies to use it online.

In our company, especially with the development teams, we had more than 100 people using the solution.

I used Microsoft Project Server for almost two or three years. It's very hard to concentrate or consolidate the portfolios of resources in different projects. It's very hard to manage. There was too much administration that we had to do, so we stopped using that tool. 

I think Atlassian is better because it includes all the features that a PM or a project team needs.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

I would recommend this solution to others.

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!

In multiple organizations, we have been using Atlassian Confluence as a knowledge base, and for development. Our developers use it alongside Jira.

What I like the most is the Wiki software that comes with Atlassian Confluence.

The interface is good and it's pretty easy to use. Most developers have some experience with Jira, which makes it pretty easy for people to pick up. We don't usually need to provide them a string.

They can easily take on some of the features from Slack. 

They could try and copy Slack more and bring them into the market a bit quicker. That would be helpful for them.

I would like to see integration with Slack.

There could be improvements with the app ecosystem. For example, if we look at Teams, there is now an entire ecosystem. With Teams, you can essentially install any apps and do any integrations. Third-party, similar to Microsoft.

It's more about integrations with third parties. That is also something that could be better.

I think it can be more competitive, considering the competition they are now going to get from Slack and Teams. For example, if you look at Microsoft Teams, Microsoft is providing 365 for free with Slack.

I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.

We have not had any issues.

We have 1100 users.

The customer support is pretty good. If you reach out to them, they are very helpful.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, I have never had any issues.

When you purchase this solution you get some support.

Jira and Confluence go hand in hand. If it's for development, and if people have money to pay for one product only, they usually end up purchasing Jira, and not Confluence. 

But at the end of the day, it's an ecosystem. It really depends on how much you want to integrate and how much you want to dive into it.

It really depends on what ecosystem they invest in and what they're looking for.

You have to look at the use case and if you already have an application in your ecosystem which is fit for purpose, you have to ask yourself, why you want to go out and pay for another product?

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for documentation purposes. Most of our company's release notes are present on Atlassian Confluence for client review and for the processes we use in our organization. All the details about the new features of the upcoming releases and all the stuff related to the company policies, like employee engagement and everything else that should be documented, are present in Atlassian Confluence. I use Atlassian Confluence for document-controlling purposes.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from its document-controlling feature. In Atlassian Confluence, controlled documents cannot be edited by anyone else.

I would say that Atlassian Confluence's old versions consume too much memory, making it an area where optimization is required from an improvement perspective.

There are some issues with the templates in Atlassian Confluence. In our company, when some team members try to edit the templates in the product, they get stuck. There were complaints about the templates being less refined. When the components increase in the template, the product's users in our company get stuck, making it in an area where improvements are required.

It would be great if Atlassian Confluence could integrate with Microsoft Teams since it would allow our company to use just one tool instead of two.

The quality of the technical support needs improvement.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence since 2020. I am a user of the tool.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution as eight out of ten due to the high memory consumption of the product, specifically its IaaS and not the SaaS version.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The tool is suitable for all types of companies. Many enterprise-level companies use Atlassian Confluence because they have lengthy processes that run for years. The aforementioned area prompts enterprises to choose Atlassian Confluence for their documentation.

Even though my company is able to open tickets with the tool's support team, we haven't gotten all of our issues resolved. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

With Atlassian Confluence, there are two types of setup processes available. My company uses the on-premises version of the product. My company also uses its own infrastructure to host Atlassian Confluence. Our company also uses the SaaS version of the product. In general, both versions of the product are being used for different projects. I think the SaaS version of the product does great in terms of memory and everything. The on-premises version of the product is a bit old but is more secure and preferred by our clients since they feel that their documents are safe in an on-premises setup.

In terms of the tool's ability to ensure better productivity of the team in our company, I would say that the old versions of Atlassian Confluence consume too much memory while also using Java libraries.

I don't think that the product ensures better communication between my team members.

It is secure to share documents through Atlassian Confluence. Documents shared via Atlassian Confluence cannot be edited or modified until and unless they are reviewed by the specific person for whom they are meant.

Though not to a large extent, my company has used Atlassian Confluence's integration capabilities. In our company, there were a few products for which we had to review the links with the clients and review the documentation, which was not much. I think Atlassian Confluence has much more to offer, but my company hasn't explored it that much.

If I consider large volumes of pages and space, I would say that the tool works fine with large virtual volumes of pages and spaces, but not all the time.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We provide this solution to customers and also use it in our company. It's often used as an intranet and then for collaboration or communication. It enables you to have project spaces or team internal spaces and different types of documentation. We are platinum partners with Atlassian and I'm a principal consultant. 

I think the structuring of information into spaces and the search functionality are really powerful features. The solution is user-friendly and anyone can comment or write documentation related to a customer's project. The main value is that Confluence makes communication easier. It has a very unique feature in that it has a marketplace of apps which means you can extend Confluence by installing apps into it and make it work differently.

I'd like to see easier integration.

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The stability is very good. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 600 users. We'll probably expand usage to new areas. 

Customer support has deteriorated because the company has grown so much. They can't provide the same level of service. We provide consultancy services so it works to our benefit.

Positive

I've also used Sharepoint and in comparing the two, Confluence makes communication much easier. SharePoint is more difficult to use and a complex solution.

The initial setup requires some planning. To get Confluence up and running took a day but it took close to a year before everyone felt comfortable with the solution. Following the initial setup, it required user management and security settings. And then build the data structure or space structure and install plugins. Following that there is a training process for users. We deployed internally because we have experience providing that type of consultancy to other companies. Half of the companies we deploy to use some external help and half do it by themselves. It takes longer if you do it without assistance.

Maintenance requires less than one man month per year because you don't have to install updates. But still there's some maintenance, cleaning up data and fixing the permits and things like that.

The ROI is both in terms of time as well as financial. 

Confluence used to be really affordable but they've been increasing their prices. It's not super expensive but more expensive than it used to be. We pay an annual licensing fee which includes some essential plugins. 

Spend some time planning the structure and how you're going to use Confluence and provide some initial training. It makes the deployment easier.

I rate this solution nine out of 10.

This solution is for sharing records. We are customers of Confluence. 

Confluence has helped us by providing faster communication.

I like the shareable and co-editing features.

If there are multiple links on one page, the usage of RAM is extremely high. I'd like to see an improvement in the way they optimize the preview of the link because it feels like too much RAM is being used.

I've been using this solution for about a year. 

There are occasionally some glitches and the system crashes, but not too often.

The setup is fairly simple, it's just a website that you login to use. There's nothing to install. Just register an account and use it. 

We've saved time by using this product. 

I use this solution all the time for record keeping. I suggest to anyone using this solution to be creative. It's a platform so its use is really up to the user. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.