Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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'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!

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 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.

My primary use case is for documentation.

The most valuable feature is the accessibility from different sites for different colleagues and the search option. 

I would like to see the text editor upgraded from its current limited abilities.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for the past ten years.

When it comes to stability I have not seen the solution go down in the past couple of years so it is good.

When it comes to scalability you can add as many documents and sites as you like. We currently have around two thousand users 

I can recommend Atlassian Confluence for any company that requires document management and documenting ongoing processes, Of course, it is not a very intuitive or very comprehensive management tool because you cannot track the requirement object changes with it, but you can use it for general documentation purposes. I would rate Atlassian Confluence an eight out of ten.

The sharing of information and simple formatting are valuable features. That is, there are no templates, and everything uses one format. This means that people don't need to worry about formatting.

When we have a project that we don't want to share with everybody but want people to know that it exists, there is no way to do this in Confluence. When a project is not shared, people cannot see that it exits.

I've been working with Confluence for eight years. It was initially on-premises, but we moved to the cloud four years ago.

It's stable, and we haven't had any issues at all.

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have about 300 users.

Some technical support staff are very helpful, but some just send documentation that is not very helpful. I would say that technical support needs improvement.

I didn't do the initial setup, but I think it's pretty easy. When I had to configure a new site, it was very easy.

SharePoint is very confusing, but Atlassian Confluence is very simple. After a couple of days, most people understand how it works, and it's quite simple.

I recommend Confluence to any company that wants to share information inside the company. Confluence is great; it's like a wiki. I would give it an eight out of ten.