Atlassian Confluence Reviews

My primary use case is for processes in project documentation.

The best feature is document management.

An area for improvement would be the intuitiveness of using the features, especially if you want to customize. In the next release, I would like to see an instant messaging feature for document collaboration.

I've been using this solution for eight years.

The stability has improved and is now good.

This solution is very scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward, though the time it takes depends on the size of the project.

Atlassian is trying to push the license for their online version, but our customers are not ready for that yet. Its licensing is also quite highly-priced.

I would give this solution a rating of eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for documentation. We used to maintain other documents in another location, but we moved to Confluence. We use it for the design documentation perspective, not for the analytics perspective. 

The most valuable feature is its design documentation abilities. 

Some aspects of the drawing perspective could be improved. When we upgrade a design and make technical architecture drawings to publish, we still use Visio first and then copy and paste it. If this feature were available on Confluence, it would be a useful tool. 

I have been using this solution for more than two years. 

This solution is stable and well-integrated with Jira. 

This solution is scalable. 

I have never directly contacted Atlassian technical support. 

I use SharePoint as well, mainly for the version control because I still need to prepare the document in Word and Visio and then load it to SharePoint. 

The initial setup, the installation, was managed by someone else. 

I implemented through an in-house team of three developers and engineers. They maintain both Confluence and Jira. 

I believe we have the Enterprise license with Confluence. 

I recommend Confluence to others. There are about 400 people in my company using this solution. However, if you are doing extensive drawings or looking for the version-control perspective, then I would caution you and suggest looking at another solution. 

I would rate Confluence a seven out of ten. 

We mainly used Jira for backlog management within IT development landscapes. We used Confluence for early-stage documentation and communication within and across teams.

Since we worked mostly with large enterprises, they typically install and host any server-based solutions on their own.

The interesting thing is the connector between Jira and Confluence (it works wiki-like and provides a deep-connection with links between both systems). The alternative is to run for early-stage backlog-items in immature state a separate wiki-instance that would not feature the proper linkage of backlog-entries automatically.

With respect to Confluence, it would be interesting if they had graphical templates that allowed typical agile ceremonies to be documented better. For example, one of the agile cadences that we regularly run is risk roaming. Confluence, as of now, doesn't provide any kind of graphical support for creating a two-by-two portfolio matrix design or even something similar. Basically, Confluence is heavily text-based. Some of my customers have actually started to tweak the system a bit and implement workarounds. On the screen, you can make it look as if it is a two-by-two portfolio; however, if there were templates provided, that would be great. The basic graphical templates that are used regularly in management would be fine. It would be great to see them supported in the future. 

In regards to Jira, it would be nice if they had two-dimensional features for backlog support. At the moment, backlog management is always a flat, one-dimensional list but our customers actually prefer having the opportunity to have that read out in a graphical fashion as well. That way, there's so much more overview and they can cluster smaller backlog items that come as a bunch. It just provides much more clarity.

Jira still seems to have issues on modelling Kanban-systems - as far as I know it still doesn't support the so-called "commitment point" (i.e. creating a non-romovable time-stamp when moving a ticket onto a board) helpful in creating transparency about start- and end-time of performing an activity — similar to signing a document in writing.

Think of it this way: if you take an item into a boardroom, it must be noted and signed. It should be done in pencil where the data could be erased later on, rather, it should be stamped — basically, you are not losing the data again. That is still an issue with these systems. That's one of the reasons why many teams who want to run Kanban methodology don't want to use Jira. They tend to use other software, which is able to do these sorts of things. 

Until 2018, I was employed with an applier of Atlassian solutions. Within that context, I used Confluence for a year. I have used Jira 2012—2018 as an end-user myself. From then onwards, I was more of a consultant to other companies implementing and using similar solutions. In short, if you count only end-usage, then it's 6 years with Jira and one year with Confluence.

With respect to our experiences with Confluence, we haven't had any issues; however, we definitely have had issues within the Jira environment back in 2014.

Scalability issues should have been fixed by now - they arose back in 2010-2014 at one of the largest enterprise implementations for multi-1.000s of concurrent users on the system, causing the system to operate very slow - I would expect that by 2020 this is treated accordingly to make the system scale without loss of performance. 

I have not personally contacted Atlassian's technical support. It was always routed via the respective IT staff, which I was not involved with.

I was not involved with technical administration or the implementation procedure from an IT infrastructure team perspective. For this reason, I can't speak for individual customers.

The problem with the pricing model is not so much the price for the Atlassian basic software itself; the issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons. The problem with add-on pricing is that it typically is always calculated based on the amount of basic Confluence or Jira licenses. Since some of the add-ons will only get used by a very limited number of users, having to pay for the full implementation (for all the people using Confluence or Jira), seems like an unfair pricing model. It also prohibits the usage of certain add-ons, too. Certain add-ons from a functionality-perspective are much more exclusive to only a few users. That pricing model should be reviewed and potentially edited or amended to make it more flexible.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. If they added the graphical templates, I would give them a higher rating.

To me, as an end-user, the topical templates are pretty basic. Under the current conditions, since COVID-19, our teams have tried to become more virtual in their collaboration model. The collaboration model that we had installed before, face-to-face, couldn't be transferred, which is kind of a pity because the graphical features are missing.

I used Confluence mostly for the wiki and documentation.

The most valuable features are the ease of creating documentation, as well as charts.

Space maintenance could be made a little more user-friendly.

I have been working with Atlassian Confluence for at least six years.

There are no bugs or glitches that I'm aware of.

This product is scalable.

Atlassian technical support is pretty good.

I am currently using the cloud version, but previously, I used to use the on-premises deployment model.

The initial setup was easy, and not complex at all.

We have an in-house team to take of maintenance.

Confluence is a good product and I recommend it. My only complaint is that certain things, such as space management, can be made easier.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.  

We primarily use it as a knowledge management tool for all of our consultants, which are architects.

The whole solution is really great. I appreciate the ability to create content, link content, and then search for that content when I need to. 

I love all of the add-ons the solution offers. You get the base product, and then you can plug in a ton of third-party apps. There's a whole ecosystem of third-party products you can add in if there are any features that may be missing on Confluence itself. That's really great. 

There are very good notifications and links. You can subscribe to a page, and whenever that page gets edited, you're notified of a change on that page.

I suppose just the whole structure and organization is what I really like about Confluence. You have at least 500 odd pages. The way it's structured, again, to speed up the ability to find stuff, is phenomenal. 

The self-service capabilities are helpful. Anyone can create content. We do, in fact. It's not one person running lots and lots of pages of content, it's everyone. You can self-service, update, and change things yourself, which is good. It's a great collaboration endeavor. We are a team of 15 people and we'll leverage the content we've created previously. The ability to collaborate on the content is quite critical to us.

The integration's very good. You still have integration with lots of third party products, and it's very good. 

We've used a lot of time in correcting our knowledge in this product. Can't really think of a negative feature of the product.

This is kind of by design, however, the lack of control in terms of editing the page to make it look the way you want it to look is an issue. It would be nice if there was more flexibility there.

It's only a very constrained format you can use. You cannot change the font and you can't really make them smaller. It is by design, but it doesn't like people playing with those aspects. It's probably gone a bit too far. The inability to format the layout of a page is an issue for us.

The logic for searching for pages is a bit off. I assumed it would be very smart in terms of looking at the content on your page and looking at what people clicked on. I assumed it would be like Google in that it would know what people clicked on previously when they were looking for this keyword, what page do they click on, et cetera. It doesn't. I found some detailed explanation of exactly how the search works and it's quite disappointing. It's very basic. Search largely depends on the title of your actual document. It doesn't look at the words in the document, and doesn't look at the search history, in terms of how people pick pages.

It turns out that the searching algorithms are very basic. When I assumed the product was bad, it was actually due to the fact that most of the knowledge management tools have very smart searching logic. This one doesn't. 

I've been using the solution for probably less than a year. It hasn't been too long.

The solution is reliable. I haven't seen a single bug or issue with the product. It's very stable. 

We have about 15 users on the solution currently.

As a company, we use Microsoft Teams. A lot of our customers say, "Oh, I know, we've got the same features in Microsoft Teams." However, that really isn't the case. Usually, if you're in a Microsoft shop, you would try and use all the Microsoft products. This is one space where Microsoft Teams doesn't cut it. We're using the Confluence instead.

The initial setup is very, very good. It's not complex it all. It's very straightforward and they make it very easy.

The entire setup isn't an intricate process. We didn't have to pour over documentation to try and figure things out. We just followed our instincts and it worked out quite well.

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need any assistance from consultants or integrators.

For us, it's free to use. We don't pay any licensing.

We don't have a business relationship with Atlassian. We're just customers.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

This solution is highly recommended. If you're looking for a product in this space, this is the best. We had another really good tool, however, we find Confluence does the same and a whole lot more. I'd say in the knowledge management space, as far as we've been doing our business, and our job is to find tools for organizations, I'm convinced that this is the top product in this space.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. My one issue is the search capabilities. Otherwise, it's pretty perfect.

We have got our own private Confluence set up. In our department, we use Jira and Confluence a lot. These are our in-house go-to tools for managing the agile ways of working. We sort of follow a bit of both models: traditional and agile. We follow the traditional waterfall model outside of Confluence and Jira, so that's more like requirements, specifications, and documents. There's another team, with which I haven't been that involved, that writes user stories and allocates tasks in Jira. They use it quite heavily.

We use Jira more for agile type processing, like for Kanban boards and all that sort of stuff and allocating work tasks and two-week sprints. It supports the actual agile process. Jira is much more focused on the process of delivery.

It is just the fact that it is a one-stop shop for all project documentation. It is compared to storing things in files and directories and stuff like that. It provides the overall usability and accessibility of many projects and documents in one area. 

It would be good if they can continue working towards making documentation and editing as quick and easy as possible. 

It has got a lot of capability, but I don't know how to use it. I don't find some of the things that intuitive. Sometimes, it doesn't seem obvious to me how to use it, but it is like learning any new tool. You actually need to get trained on the tool to get maximum out of it.

I have been using this solution for the last two to three years.

It is scalable.

We have our own engineers.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I would rate Atlassian Confluence an eight out of ten. It provides everything for our use cases.

We are a remote company at this point. We use it to collaborate on different initiatives within our interior and marketing teams. It's kind of our one-stop-shop to house our collateral and sales information. It covers pretty much anything and everything we need and everything our marketing teams would need as well.

We really like how it organizes everything. I don't know if it's because of the ability to create different pages or not, however, everything is very organized. It's easy to differentiate different materials based on the project and navigate to them. The solution makes it so it's very easy to navigate and very easy to search. 

It's extremely intuitive.

The solution is great for non-technical users. You don't have to have a big technological background to work with it effectively. I myself am not very technical and I can get around it without much difficulty.

The UI is good but bland. It could be updated a bit to make it more modern and interesting to look at.

I've only been using the solution since January of 2020, so it's been about six months now.

The stability of the solution is great. There are no issues whatsoever there. I haven't found that it crashes or freezes. There aren't bugs or glitches that affect the way it functions. I would say that it is very consistent and reliable.

I assume the scalability of the solution is good. My company has used it for several years now. We've been growing in that time and we haven't had any kind of stability issues and we've never felt like the solution has gotten too small to meet our needs. It grows with us. We've been able to utilize it as we've needed, as we've grown. It seems to scale nicely.

I've never had a need to reach out to technical support, so I can't speak to the quality of its services.

We also use Salesforce as a project management tool. They aren't really the same, however, we do use the two in tandem.

I don't know what the licensing costs for the solution are at this time.

We're Atlassian customers. I'm just the customer success manager, so I'm not on the technical or the testing side.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are on, however, I believe it to be the most up to date version that is currently available.

I'd advise other organizations, if they decide to implement the solution, to really utilize it. If you plan to use it as a really strong collaborative tool, ensure that everyone using it has access to the required documents and that they utilize it on a consistent basis. I've found the most benefits from using it when I'm consistent with it. You really need to update it as often as you update your Salesforce. That might mean daily updating, depending on how you use it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had better UI, I might rate it a bit higher.

Our primary use for this solution is EA documentation.

Confluence has helped us through its ease of use and access to relevant information in a targeted way.

The most valuable features are hyper-linking, the Drawing Tool, and enhanced tables.

The standard table capability is substandard and virtually unusable.  However with the "Advanced Tables for Confluence" from Bob Swift, this problem was solved.  The standard table functionality does not have enough functionality to document things clearly starting with colors.  The other tool which is extremely useful is IO Draw although it is expensive.  With these two extensions, I was able to really maximize my use of Confluence.

I have been using this solution for four years.

Implementing Confluence in documenting functional specifical documents and preparing RTMs, product requirements.

It has tremendously improved our organisational culture, as it is a more streamlined way of handling customer issues/responses/queries and for documenting.

Integration with JIRA, draw.io, Creately, and other mockups tools is a boon to Confluence's usage in handling complex problems.

Confluence textual editor could be improved and integrated with MS Word for easy usage and better formatting of documents.

It is indeed a stable and error-free application, as it is a mature application running for decades.

It can be easily scaled up to different levels if used wisely.

Quick support with an easy resolution.

N/A.

Straightforward.

In-house.

N/A.

• It's easy to set up, as it gives a quick guide for the same process.
• Costing and pricing may vary depending on usage.

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