Atlassian Confluence Room for Improvement
BB
WiseCat
Enterprise Architect, CISSP at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »An area for improvement in Atlassian Confluence is encouraging more vital interaction among the project members or users involved. I was researching a tool, but I forgot the exact name of the tool, and that tool could be used for better interactions offline among users on a specific topic, development, or discussion. I want that feature to be present in Atlassian Confluence. If there's a possibility to integrate Atlassian Confluence, Jira, and that other tool, that will make Atlassian Confluence better.
My team had problems accessing Atlassian Confluence a couple of times, but I wonder if that was due to a network, server, or tool issue. I have to say that I've been working with Atlassian Confluence for years, and it has been improving its functionalities, so I feel that as a tool, it's working very well, but some features could still be improved.
For example, the search engine should allow you to define some keywords you could use when searching, though I wonder if it's staff-related or setup-related, or lacking in the search engine function itself.
I also want artificial intelligence added to Atlassian Confluence where you're working on a specific issue or argument, and Atlassian Confluence, through its AI, can propose some improvements based on what has been done on the same topic by different teams or different projects within the same infrastructure, similar to an internal reference, which can be helpful. Through AI, it would also be great if Atlassian Confluence could advise you on what has been done outside your specific project, and maybe there's the possibility of an installation where you have several projects installed and working together.
Another feature that would be good to have in the next release of Atlassian Confluence is the tool recognizing a keyword or two that's fully developed in project B, which you can use in project A, for example.
View full review »The cost of the solution is too high.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Atlassian Confluence
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Atlassian Confluence. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
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I would like Confluence to include the ability to draw flowcharts and diagrams.
There's a small tool that you can use to draw, but it was very cumbersome. When you have to import or paste the pictures, you have to get that information into the table columns. When you're merging or unmerging, the table can break. Copy and paste on Excel doesn't work easily because Excel is the primary tool that most people use.
Excel is very easy to use. Confluence has issues with usability. It's slightly cumbersome. If they made it more usable with Excel and drawings, it would be a much more powerful tool.
I have a problem with the burndown chart, for example, if I put a time only on the estimation block, it'll not show on the burndown chart. It has to be the points.
I'd like to see better reporting.
The UX is a little bit all over the place. From my experience, people really find it very hard to cope with Jira when they start using that.
The setup could be streamlined further.
View full review »Confluence could incorporate stronger records management and automation features. The current management structure is too open, which becomes an issue.
View full review »On the reporting front, if Atlassian can bring in more Jira inside Confluence, it would be good since it fails to do so currently. When it comes to the UI with respect to the functionalities, Confluence cannot replace Microsoft Word at the moment, so even though it can be used as a document management system, it is not meant for document creation, which adds a lot of limitations to it. Users will not be able to provide Confluence as a standard document. The aforementioned aspects are areas where Atlassian can have a look at and slightly refine the product.
In terms of reporting, the tool provides a very limited aspect when it comes to its ability to allow users to pull data from Jira and give a report. Reporting works in many ways when you want to present something with respect to a project or status to C-level professionals. Putting reports to be presented to C-level professionals in Jira is a very tough task, but instead, if you can make it inside of it as a document, then it would be easier, printable, and convertible into PDF, or else, you can embed it elsewhere as well, helping provide more clarity to users on what exactly is happening, after which it can provide real-time reporting of the project.
Atlassian Confluence is not really a community-friendly solution. If you have a company, you'll have a license for each person, but it does not have such features as commenters. For example, Jira Service Desk has licensed agents and customers who are public and not licensed. Atlassian Confluence has no public type of users who can comment or do any activity without a license.
View full review »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.
View full review »I work with Confluence, however, I'm not sure what's lacking.
The price could be improved. I have heard that certain adjustments would be made in 2024 and that it will then be more expensive, but I don't know the specifics.
View full review »LN
LionelNa
Commercial manager at AIOps
We currently only use this solution for retrieving information. In a previous company, I also used it for HR and onboarding. The one way in which this solution could be improved is by offering better design and UI.
Nowadays, the standard for documentation for developers is mostly in Markdown, so pretty much everything we can do is in the Markdown language. The support for Confluence to import something that's in Markdown is not that great. Sometimes it's also not that great when it comes to including code snippets or similar things, so I think the couple of improvement areas would be around Markdown support and support for adding code.
As for added features, I would like to see more flexibility in the way we can design a workflow in Confluence, and maybe some templates that we can use based on the purpose of the document.
I would also like to see more integration with other common application services. Other than draw.io, there is not much integration to other services like Lucidchart or similar services, which are helpful for reporting your documentation with drawings and architecture diagrams. Those improvements would make it a bit more user-friendly.
View full review »Some macros can be technical, and they are better managed on the Confluence cloud rather than on-premises. For example, when you add an image on the cloud, you can resize it just by using the mouse. This is not the case on-premises yet. You have to write pixels of the size of the image sometimes.
Some of the very old macros are still there, and some of them are technical. It can be hard for users if they are not from an IT background to understand how to use them quickly.
There's a feature that is really helpful that I like, but it is inside the cloud version and not in the on-premises version. It is the inline comment in edit mode. In fact, you can do inline comments on articles and pages on both the cloud and on-premises versions, but when you modify the page on the cloud, you can still see them but in edit mode. When you edit the page, you cannot see them anymore. You need to have two tabs in order to remember what the comments were.
View full review »NK
NaveenKumar23
Human Resources Executive at Sticky IO
The solution does have tons of features, but sometimes we don't want every feature to be there, we just want a basic solution. They don't offer the option to customize the package, so you get everything with the one bundle price. Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything. There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model.
View full review »KA
reviewer1929324
Head of Architecture at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
I would like to see more macros provided by the company. Currently, those macros require extra cost. Additional free capability for those types of integration or components would be helpful in the existing license.
View full review »We have to use other applications that make Atlassian Confluence more customized for what you want. They should improve by adding the ability to make more customizations.
In a future release, they could add easy reporting. For example, EZPi can be deployed easily into
View full review »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.
View full review »FC
Fabio Casasus
Co-Founder - Managing Partner at Helvetia Fintech
The performance could be improved, we sometimes run into difficulties creating tables.
There is room for improvement in terms of pricing.
View full review »RR
Rajashekher Reddy
DevOps Engineer at Bosch
The solution's user experience needs to be improved. The solution is not very user-friendly. From my perspective, it should be more user-friendly.
In the future, the solution should be able to integrate with other tools. I think it is integrated only with Jira. But there are other tools with which it could also be integrated. We should be able to integrate this tool to get a trace of what information we are gathering. Maybe it is only possible for Jira because it is a Jira product.
KP
Khar Yeow Phang
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The area that needs improvement is the search capability. It should have generalized capabilities. The support should be better when it comes to analytics features.
View full review »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.
View full review »AD
Anthony Q. DeLoach
Program Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees
The basic improvement needed from my perspective (and it may be more to do with how Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has allowed certain features of Confluence to be used) is the ability to move multiple attachments at a time. I would like to be able to copy a set of pages in Confluence as a template. It would be nice to have better business collaboration examples.
View full review »SS
Santhosh Sadashivan
Director of IT product at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
This solution should have customized dashboards that could be built by the user and connect to the data and filtering mechanisms to create dashboards. It will be great for any C-level executive to monitor their KPIs rather than depend on somebody else to create them. So, the dashboards should be improved.
DC
Deepshikha Choudhary
Technical Lead at Capgemini
We would like there to be more advanced data manipulation features available in this solution, such as creating more complex charts, and a column freezing option.
View full review »FC
Fedor Chavdar
Product Manager at GAZPROM ID
The flexibility and simplicity of this solution could be improved. We would also like the ability to add plugins.
There could be an option to collaborate with other users while editing the documents. We have to wait for other users to edit and release the document to make further changes or updates.
View full review »Some elements of the user interface could be more user-friendly, including embedding diagrams. In the next release, I'd like to see better integration with diagramming tools or software architecture.
View full review »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.
View full review »HG
reviewer1768827
IT R&D Project Portfolio PMO Lead at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
The user interface could be improved.
View full review »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.
There is no concept of peer review or a draft mode - whatever you write is live. What typically happens is that the navigation bar becomes frighteningly large and difficult to read unless someone takes the reigns and curbs the knee jerk reaction to keep creating new branches in wiki's hierarchical tree.
View full review »The WYSIWYG editor is great, but there are some problems with formatting. Tables and fonts are not always rendered correctly, especially when CCS is used to customize them. It is useful to understand Wiki Markup language to get around these problems.
The use of CSS can be a challenge, making customization difficult for new starters who have little experience of creating/editing CSS.
View full review »I'd like to see easier integration.
IZ
Istvan-Zsikla
IT consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I would like to see the text editor upgraded from its current limited abilities.
View full review »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.
View full review »It has good integrations, but its integration capabilities can be improved.
They can improve the table feature of Confluence. It is currently not adequate.
RL
reviewer1828764
Sr. Manager - Global Systems Manager at a paper AND forest products with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »I would like to see an improvement in licensing so I’m not paying for inactive users. Basically, I’d like the “system” to count unique active users for the past month and only charge me for those, rather than me manually assigning licenses to users. That user management/subscriptions management was a bit painful, especially in larger environments.
View full review »GM
reviewer2034477
Advisor at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
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.
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.
View full review »I'd like to see some improved reporting on usage.
View full review »DB
Donatas Bukelis
Project Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
There is room for improvement in maybe the tree structure for articles. If you have a lot of articles, it becomes difficult to navigate.
Having the ability to control which articles appear in the main tree structure and only linking or hyperlinking to others within specific articles could be an improvement.
View full review »AS
reviewer1925466
Scrum Master at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
The way Atlassian Confluence handles tickets could be improved. This process should be easier, more flexible and more useable, such as the ease of creating a table.
View full review »IS
Iman Setiawan
Data Management at Wesfarmers OneDigital
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.
PG
reviewer1320141
Business Analyst at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »- Some versions have annoying bugs from time to time. Doesn't all software?
- The interface and functionality is different for users used to legacy content management systems like SharePoint. However, spending a few minutes with Confluence and its intuitive interface will have them creating content quickly.
I also manage a SharePoint team, so I'm not biased. It’s just my opinion based on what I see.
View full review »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.
View full review »KK
KishoreKumar2
Sr Associate at a maritime company with 501-1,000 employees
On the cloud, we do not have a source editor if you want to go and validate the watch type of HTML or if you want to pull that HTML content for that cloud of pages. Atlassian needs to provide the source editor or a built-in plugin.
SS
reviewer1431804
System Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »The ability to delegate administrative roles, very difficult to give someone delegated administrative ability – almost all or nothing.
View full review »YX
Yiming Xiao
Mass Spectometry Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »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.
Some things like:
- Being able to (default) sort comments on pages with the last comment first.
- Being able to require “restricted access” permission to view Confluence pages (like JSD).
- The Atlassian cloud pricing model is pretty steep. Confluence should be accessible by a relatively large audience, but the pricing model prohibits this. For example, we like to grant our customers access.
- Inheritable permissions. This enables a “tree” of pages to share the same permissions. Currently, permissions can be set on a space, and altered per page. This is not very handy, as it is easy to forget setting permissions where it is needed or desired.
Atlassian Confluence should improve the interface, it needs to be more user-friendly. It is easy to use, but it could be more intuitive.
View full review »SM
Steven Malone
Operations Support Specialist at Heartland Payment Systems
We let some data fields get out of control as well as some product submissions, so some type of mass maintenance capability to easily reset or restart the system without losing all configuration options would be helpful.
View full review »SY
Sergio Yazyi
Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see the solution do the following:
- Provide analytics on content usage to help foster adoption. Currently, the statistics have to be requested and are very basic in the cloud version.
- Help in the organization of the content (i.e., help identify "dead nodes", build different perspectives and categorization automatically with a type of page mapping and navigation other than a hierarchical tree.)
- Improve concurrent collaborative editing. (A relatively new feature has already been proven and is evolving in other products such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office Online.)
- Help in the consumption of updates according to personalized interest.
Reporting on content usage info and patterns is completely missing and would be a great addition. On-demand is especially limited due to the significantly reduced number of plug ins available. Reassignment of content ownership would also be a nice feature.
View full review »The search ability (using Lucene) is less than optimal and has known bugs that are slow in getting addressed. Search is key on any content platform.
View full review »Managing user permissions and credentials could be easier.
View full review »LF
Lindsay Fifield
Customer Success Manager at LogiGear Corporation
The UI is good but bland. It could be updated a bit to make it more modern and interesting to look at.
View full review »I would like to see the following improvements:
- When comparing page changes, you are only able to select 2 pages. While this is useful, it has proven to be a slight limitation when many people are editing a document. Having said this, we work around it by selecting the last “approved version” and the latest version. The downside is that we are unable to then see who made the change and when they made it without going to that specific history version are comparing it to the version just prior to it.
- Page approval: there is a feature whereby you are able to require page approval, but it can only be applied at a space level (with the ability to apply certain exclusions). The exclusion capability is not intuitive and therefore does not always work as expected. In addition, there is usually a specific parent and child set within a space that we would want to set approval requirements on. The approval plugin also keeps adding “Unapproved” blocks to the top of the page whenever an edit occurs. These continue to build up despite the fact that there has not been a status change (i.e. the page has not yet been approved, so one “Unapproved” block would be sufficient).
Sometimes has issues with cron jobs crashing - need to check more recent versions to see if this has been resolved.
I'd also love to see integrated project management with Gantt charts, but I'm a sucker for Gantt charts.
View full review »BH
Bilal Haidar
Quality Assurance Team Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
MP
Michael Peterson
GM Technology at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »MD
Morgan Day
Managing Consultant - Enterprise Architecture at Wipro Technologies
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.
View full review »It is not as professional as FrameMaker. Confluence is light and very convenient, but it is difficult to reuse the same content and its format is not as flexible as FrameMaker.
View full review »I think that customization and text styling could be improved.
View full review »DM
David Molesworth
Delivery Lead at Cyma
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.
View full review »Being robust when dealing with complex pages, eating too much CPU, badly designed plugins.
View full review »There are two things which annoy us the most:
(a) It is written in Java and therefore comes with all the overhead and issues of Java applications.
(b) It doesn't allow editing documents with multiple users at the same time.
View full review »1. When excel sheets are added for being displayed, it skips document formats and does not recognize merged cells.
2. Supports only MS office 97-2003 formats. Should also support 2010 formats as its a overhead to convert everytime.
3. JIRA and Confluence connectivity needs to be stabilized. We've faced embarrassing situations with stakeholders when the Confluence pages could not pull the list of JIRAs to be referenced on the page.
View full review »SL
Sebastian Lawrence
Solutions Delivery Lead at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Space maintenance could be made a little more user-friendly.
View full review »- A lot of bugs already reported to Atlassian are not addressed.
- Avatars must be square.
- Status lozenges must offer more than three colors.
Working with 3rd party content i.e. MS office, PDF files, email integration
View full review »RS
RajatSharma
RPA Business Consultant at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
Confluence textual editor could be improved and integrated with MS Word for easy usage and better formatting of documents.
View full review »Rich text could always be better but it is nice to have.
View full review »The license part is too flexible.
View full review »Surprisingly enough the text editor is very limited in its functionality and given the fact that so many forum platforms and web sites have mastered this tool I believe Atlassian have no excuse to keep it this way. It lacks basics such as text highlighting, and adjusting the text size and working with tables is a nightmare. Text formatting and working with numbers and bullet points is time consuming. I would like to see more plugins and additional functionality such as embedding of other pages, drop down menus, insert buttons, and page templates.
View full review »
I had a tough time importing Word and allowing use of an external style sheet (and not import hard coded).
Also, the pricing module needs to be adjusted. We want all our customers to be able to view Confluence as anonymous users. However, all our customers require a log in to our platform. And, to integrate with Confluence would require user licenses for every one of our users (over 10,000). It is not affordable.
View full review »
DM
reviewer1119327
Works at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
In the next release, I would like to have the ability to import pictures.
View full review »BK
reviewer1423197
CEO & CPO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »- Bulk editing of documents
- Reports
- Content sharing
- Document publishing
It takes some thought into how to structure confluence in a way which is intuitive for the team to use.
Search only takes you to a page, not an area of a page.
View full review »I think the user interface could be more graphically pleasing, as well as establishing permissions across various spaces and user levels a bit clearer.
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The search is pretty terrible. You can search for something that is quite close to text that appears in an article, and nothing will come up. I consistently have a hard time finding the things I care about on our wiki.
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MF
Mathias Florian
Business developer at Bat.IT
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.
View full review »There are certain features, like AD FS and workflows, that don't appear to be mature enough for Enterprise use.
View full review »I don't see the need for any large improvements. There are a number of minor improvements that are documented by Atlassian and also some problems waiting to be solved. For us, there are no items that we are sleepless waiting for.
View full review »I've always found search to be buggy. Sometimes, searching for a keyword or phrase will result in no matches, despite me later finding a posting with that exact word or phrase.
Also, organizing content via folders could be improved. Nested folders only goes two levels deep, while more nesting levels would be helpful. Resorting to using tags for posts is more difficult, as too many tags were getting created by our teams and it became a nightmare.
View full review »All of the departments need improvement.
View full review »I would like to see the ability for each user to config his own home page,
View full review »User interface (UI) could be improved.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Atlassian Confluence
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Atlassian Confluence. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
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