Atlassian Confluence Reviews

Every project and every initiative we start gets a Confluence site to track artifacts that are created related to that initiative. For example, we will use it for a knowledge base and for general documentation. We collect all of our meeting minutes, action lists, and so on. It is grouped in scenarios for reference, et cetera.  

I think it is easy to use. There are a large number of out-of-the-box templates, which can satisfy the majority of use cases. If those templates do not quite cover what you want them to do, you can tweak the templates so you can create your own just so you end up with standardized content look and feel. It integrates well with the other Atlassian products, like the Jira software, which we use for our software development teams.  

Overall I am pretty satisfied with it. We like the user interface and it is similar to the Jira software as well which makes it very familiar.  

Workflows is an area where it could be improved. Out-of-the-box, it does not have a good workflow solution, which is a bit odd given that there is a good workforce solution in Jira software. We had to purchase a workflow management tool off the marketplace called Kamala and that probably should not have been necessary. So, they could probably do with a bit of development on the workflows front to include a better solution out-of-the-box, but other than that, not a lot needs to be improved.  

Personally, I have been using Confluence since around 2013. About seven years.  

Confluence does not have any bugs, glitches that I can recall.  

The scalability is pretty good.  

The installation and setup for Confluence itself is relatively straightforward. There is good online documentation for it as well. The templates help make easy work of the design and site creation.  

I would recommend Confluence, especially for anyone that is using other Atlassian products. It is a simple, additional, license to get the solution and it integrates really well with the other products in the Atlassian family.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Confluence overall as a product as an eight-out-of-ten. I would not rate it higher because like all the Atlassian products, there are certain things I think the product should have out-of-the-box without you needing to go to the marketplace. For example, it does not have an approvals type of workflow. If you want to create content and have other people review and approve it before it gets published that should be available. I would think that is something that it should have out-of-the-box.  

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.

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. 

We mostly use Atlassian Confluence to store information and share knowledge with a colleague.

It is a very popular tool.

Making integration with other tools easier would be beneficial. 

I have found, for example, that Confluence and Teams may be integrated. It's a Microsoft tool, and I was having trouble integrating it the last time.

I have been with the company for one month.

I have been working with Atlassian Confluence for one month.

In my opinion, Atlassian Confluence is very stable.

Atlassian Confluence appears to be quite scalable based on the applications that I have seen.

It is difficult to estimate since we are an international company with, I believe, 2,000 employees in Belgium. It is possible that we have 100 users.

I have not had any contact with technical support.

I am familiar with New Relic and Dynatrace.

I am quite junior at Dynatrace, but this is the tool we use at work.

We use Dynatrace, Azure DevOps, and SharePoint. I'm considering all of my options. At the present, we largely use the tools I stated.

I did automate SharePoint, but it was in a previous mission.  It was a previous job; it is not my present employment.

I don't use GitLab or BitBucket personally, but it's possible that in the future, we will have to implement those tools for the clients.

We are an Atlassian partner, BitBucket is an Atlassian product.

I'm also involved with DevOps. It depends on what the client requests, and we are highly likely to use such products.

We also work with JIRA. Some of our colleagues are JIRA administrators.

We used to store using text editors before, but nothing compared to Confluence.

The initial setup is very simple.

I am not aware of the pricing.

My organization has a partnership with Dynatrace, and I have created a small project to compare New Relic with Dynatrace. I downloaded a report, which was helpful in this regard.

I recommend it to all developers as well as students. because I used it as a student in a team. 

We are able to store all of the necessary information for all of the students,  developers, and architects.  All the individuals involved in our software projects.

Also, it is functional.

I believe we are a reseller and a partner, but I'm not sure since it's largely my colleagues. 

For the implementation of Atlassian, some of them are already certified, and with the certification, they are a partner. They work with a limited number of Atlassian-certified individuals.

I would rate Atlassian Confluence an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for all activities related to the software development lifecycle. We use it starting from product spec and product definition documents and release notes to any customer discussion documents, design or architecture documents.

The ease of use has been one of the most valuable features. It has a very simple wiki. The other salient feature is the search capability and association with Jira, which comes integrated with it that makes it convenient to use.

The user interface is a little bit stale. The file attachments and how they work could be improved. There is also room for improvement when it comes to CDNs. 

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

This is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

This is a very scalable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have rarely needed any assistance from the support team. When we have needed support, they have been very helpful. 

Positive

The initial setup is very simple.

The Confluence pricing is good. The only challenge we have experienced is with Jira and the add ons we use that need to be paid for separately. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use Confluence for project documentation alongside Jira which we use for all our task assignments.

We have been using Jira for six months and have not yet used it to its full potential as we do not have qualified scrum masters in our team. We are able to assign tickets, make a scrum board and a sprint system. 

We have thousands of users who work with this solution. 

When you are creating a table in Confluence, there is no tool to export it into Excel sheet for quick references. We can only export it as an a PDF file, but not into an editable file.

If you new user wants to have access to data and do some analysis on the data, they need to convert it to PDF and then extract the tables. We would like to have an export button that could move the data to an editable format. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We have not yet contacted the customer support team for this solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

The implementation was completed by a third party. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

We use this solution to manage the knowledge base within our organization. We're looking to use Confluence for collaboration and data, sharing information internally and externally. Confluence is connected to our JIRA, so we also use it for task management. And vice versa, JIRA can link to the Confluence page. We are customers of Confluence and I'm a data manager.

It's great for us that this is a free format. It's easy to share information with other people and the integration with JIRA is good. The product is getting better all the time with a new template and new functionalities. This is a robust, agile, and reliable tool for collaborating. 

The search function is not great. That's one area where we feel that Confluence is lacking. The second issue is that an additional license is required when you are sharing data externally. There are a couple of instances where we've had integration issues with other apps and that needs to be improved. I'd like to see more of a workflow process. For example, an approval process, where you get through one layer and then go to the next layer, like the process that SharePoint has. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The product is becoming more stable and reliable these days, I think. A couple of versions ago we had some issues when a lot of users were updating to the same page or sharing documents. It's much more reliable now and we haven't had any problems in the past six months. 

Our company is not that big so we haven't needed to scale. 

We deployed in-house. 

Licensing is not very expensive. The issue is that engagement with an external party or stakeholder requires the purchase of an additional license. It's the same issue if we have a consultant coming on board and is a pain point for us.

It's important to understand your needs in terms of the number of processes and number of people you need to support in your organizational structure. Implementing up front will likely help in terms of knowing in advance that the product will be supported. Otherwise, there might be a situation where the configuration will need to be changed after the initial setup. Confluence was initially somewhat complex for us. There were a lot of things we needed to consider and configure. Over time as we grow and evolve as a business we're getting more of an understanding of how the solution works and it's getting easier. There's a learning curve.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.