Confluence Reviews

Pros

Confluence is a powerful collaboration tool that offers several impactful features. Its most impactful features include the ability to create and organize content, collaborate in real-time, and have version control for easy tracking and reverting of changes. With a user-friendly interface and intuitive design, Confluence is generally considered easy to use, allowing users to navigate, create, and edit content seamlessly. As for integration with existing business processes, Confluence provides various integrations and APIs that make integration with other tools and systems relatively straightforward. It offers flexible options for customizations, allowing businesses to tailor the tool to their specific needs and workflows, thus facilitating a smooth integration process with existing business processes.

Cons

As an end user of Confluence, I find the tool to be quite robust for collaboration, but there are a few features that I feel could be improved or added. For instance, I would appreciate more advanced formatting options, better task management capabilities, and improved visualization options for data. Additionally, I must admit that certain aspects of the product, such as complex permissions settings and the learning curve associated with advanced features, can be difficult to use initially. When it comes to integrating Confluence with our existing business processes, the level of difficulty can vary based on the complexity of our processes and the specific integrations required. In some cases, it has been challenging and has required additional configuration or development efforts, but Atlassian does provide resources, documentation, and support to help facilitate the integration process.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Primavera Cloud and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

Less features in Workday

Switched From

Workday Adaptive Planning

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Those are planning tool but confluence come with JIRA tool as KM application.

Pros

Confluence's suite of team communication tools is crucial to any effort to increase output. It's a lot dependable and much cheaper than other options. It's essential equipment for anyone seeking total control over their team's overall performance.

Cons

It's a steep learning curve for our less tech-savvy customers to become proficient at working on our websites. The fact that the support staff is exclusively fluent in English may also be an inconvenience for some consumers. Integration with Azure DevOps is a little bit of a challenge.

Pros

I like it’s collaborative features that allows seamless engagement and communication.

Cons

It is a great collaborative program, nothing that I dislike towards it.

Pros

Confluence has a wide use-case. We use Confluence as a knowledge sharing platform and there is a lot of potential in that. I like how confluence shows you "related articles" when you are reading something because this helps me to find the information I am looking for faster.

Cons

I find this platform way too hard to navigate. I find that when I do not know exactly what I am looking for, I am very unlikely to find it. In addition, I don't find that the search function always picks up what I am looking for; it seems to be very specific.

Pros

I greatly enjoy the Kanban views, and ability to easily set up reporting across teams/boards. It's fairly easy to customize. Planning Sprints and seeing burn down reports is also very easy with this tool.

Cons

There really isn't much I dislike. I haven't used it for Resource Management so if you need to be able to do that ...I'm not sure if this is the tool for you.

Pros

The easy UI and descent editing options that are available.

Cons

Joint-editing a page is cumbersome as it provides less options to accept/discard changes.

Pros

This is a digital workspace that enables us to work as a team.
I like how Confluence has been promoting collaboration at our workplace.

Cons

I am impressed by the flawlessness of Confluence.
Confluence is so amazing and powerful.

Pros

documentation of various team artifacts. all in one place.

Cons

server performance can be slow sometimes. if there's an outage, it impacts critical business tasks.

Pros

The amount of possibilities to create docs for my company.

Cons

For beginners Confluence is quite hard to manage but after a while you're getting a hang of it

Pros

It is easy to create and modify pages. Links and attachment are properly supported.

Cons

Search function cannot get to the page that I need. As a workaround, I rely to my broswer's bookmark function to help me find the page at a later time.

Pros

Confluence gives best documentation platform for your projects. We can categorize based on different projects and sub projects. we can create links to another pages which is very useful to route to another document without searching for it. we can see all the documents related one project in one section. It gives you wide range of features to include images and diagrams to make the documentation more useful. We can also subscribe to the pages so that anyone make any changes we get notified.

Cons

Confluence needs more integration with the CICD tools available in the market to make more automated documentation. confluence needs to provide to create diagrams for documentation so that users dont need to go for external software for that.

Alternatives Considered

Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

In confluence I can categorize based on projects and sub projects and I can see all the documents for that project and select based on the priorities. But in google docs we need to we need to keep a separate index for each documents and the docs are separate. we need to browse through the google docs to go to next one.

Pros

The software provides a rather generous free tier. The search capabilities are quite good, and there are many page formatting options, which makes it quite a good Wiki software potentially. However, the bugs and shortcomings of this software renders it rather unusable for us.

Cons

The software is VERY buggy, tends to crash unexpectedly (we tested it on strong machines, across users and browsers). It takes FOREVER to login. Getting to your Wiki takes lots of unnecessary clicks. What's worst is that each page must hold a unique names, so if for example you plan to create several page structures (with subpages and so on) with similar names, forget about it. It's due to the legacy architectural structure of the software, and can't be easily changed. Unfortunately, that what makes it fall behind. We dropped it for favor of modern alternatives.

Pros

Confluence provides a safe method for sharing knowledge and working on projects among team members. The main business, Atlassian, provides a wide range of reliable plugins. Because everyone on the team can make changes to the document repository and see when and who made them, this is one of the finest features of confluence's document sharing and management system.

Cons

Many plugins are available, and it might be difficult to pick the ideal one for our purposes. This takes up a lot of time. The guidelines are typically adequate.

Pros

Confluence is a great tool for having all your documentation and knowledge in one place. You can create wiki pages for each topic and group these pages under 'Spaces'. Multiple team members can work on one page simultaneously. It captures a detailed audit trail on the changes made at a page level. You can have strong control on the content publishing by defining a robust review and approval process. It has a robust search functionality and it seamlessly integrates with JIRA, MS Teams and other third party tools.

Cons

One major issue with Confluence is that when multiple people are working on one page simultaneously, then you need to refresh the page in order to see the changes made by others. Also, the access control can be complex and glitchy sometimes.I would love if the user interface for Confluence is improved.

Pros

You can design your own page layouts in Confluence and use them for your content. This facilitates the development of uniform, expert-looking web pages. Using Confluence's built-in macro functionality, you can easily incorporate data-driven elements like tables, charts, and photos into your pages. The ability to leave comments on Confluence pages facilitates conversation and furthers teamwork.

Cons

One of my biggest gripes with Confluence is how sluggish and unresponsive it can be at times. When working on a group project, this can be very irritating. In addition, the search function isn't always the most refined, and it may take some time to locate the data you require.

Pros

#1 I love Confluence, as it's so user friendly and so simple to use. I've taken it and built out the structure at my new company, as well as previous ones to make our shared Confluence space a HUB for our Documentation, Meetings Customers/Projects/Team, Resources, Planning, you name it. It's so easy and it's a great way to keep everyone informed and involved. AND you can customize how it looks.

Cons

Not much I dislike. Maybe if I could have a few more customization options, but that is about it.

Pros

Confluence is great for creating company manuals or documenting company procedures. Think of it as a formal business blog or a wiki where you can keep a record of anything from basic tables outlining company info to company policies which can then be shared with the rest of the employees so that they can in turn, learn and input their own observations and knowledge. It organizes the pages for you and it makes it easy for anyone to search, edit and add new pages to keep the knowledge growing. At my company, we use it as a manual and all new employees have to read through it as part of their training. It allows you to add photos or videos to document special past events or to just simply make the page more interesting. The formatting ribbon looks similar to Microsoft word's so if you have experience with using a Word document then it should be no problem using the different types of formating options and if you have no experience then you'll get the hang of it pretty soon as it's fairly easy to deduce what each button does. I love how it is able to save any edits you make to a page and it doesn't publish it until you are ready so you are able to make new pages and edit old ones at your own pace and once you are done you can click on "publish". It alows you to restrict what other people can and cannot edit, it sends notifications to those who have a user in your account. I would recommend it.

Cons

The interface could use more color or some pizzazz as it looks pretty dull and it reminds me of an electric appliance manual: gray and boring to the point that you feel like throwing it away but then you are too afraid to do so because you may never know when you might need it. But then again, I use it as a company manual so I can't do much there, I'm guessing if you want something prettier then go get a blogging account but Confluence gets straight to the point and it should be taken seriously.

Pros

We use Confluence for serval years now, together with Jira (Ticket Management) and Bamboo (Build Server). It has proven its value time and again for us and provided us with clear, easy to navigate and edit business documentation for almost all areas of business. The Editor is esy to use, there are Plugins for all imaginable use cases (for example specific PDF exports) and a great FAQ and very helpful community. The Editor for content is fantastically in terms of ease of use and results to be generated. Also all Articles are stored versioned, so you can easyly go back a version, or check what has been changed in case you have to get back up to speed on a topic you left checking a while ago. You can follow authors, topics or wiki Spaces so Confluence keeps you in the loop about what is happening. In case you work on confidential material the user access management is just a dream to use, simple, powerful and without any ruged edges. Additional Features are added and when they are they are well thought through and perfectly conceptualized. I never have found a feature which did not deliver what it promised and more. Some are not for me but the ones that were introduced and sounded interesting generally were. This is THE tool for anyone who wants to document all kinds ok business knowledge from simple things like HowTo or FAQ Article to complex branches of deccsion documentations connected to development progress (by Jira ticket integration).

Cons

Confluence has a lot of great features. The main Issue with Wiki Systems often is they work great in teh beginning and later become bogged down with badly maintained content or just forgotten structures. The search for the wiki still is not perfect. It has improved and is fine to use but I have seen better. There are also not a lot of features that support administrators in decluttering a large or huge Wiki and sometimes we had issues for complex, nested user rights. Also as always the case when you have an ecosystem of plugins, you have to make sure anything is compatible with a new version before you update, especially if it is a third party extension. Don't get me wrong, there is not much to complain here, you have to really look hard in order to find anything bad about Confluence.

Pros

We use Confluence on a daily basis to document various aspects of our organization. There is a large variety of built-in templates for a variety of sorts of documents. We heavily utilize the how-to articles to record procedures. Although it does link with other Altassian products, like Jira, we don't use that functionality currently as we run Confluence on-site and Jira in the cloud. The upgrade to version 6 greatly increased the usefulness of the product, as it brought in concurrent editing, ala Google Docs, which was functionality we needed when developing procedures for an event as a group. The search and indexing capabilities make it easy to find a document if its location is not obvious.

Cons

Search and indexing can lose usefulness in the event you have many similar documents, like say a checklist that is executed often. I would like a function to be able to click a check box to "ignore results like this." The initial setup of Confluence was not completely straightforward, however, we were installing on an older version, version 5. (The upgrade to version 6 went much smoother.) I would prefer an omnibus install package if it doesn't currently have that rather than having to install PostgreSQL and the application. The LDAP integration could have been a little bit smoother than it was, although it is in line with the other Atlassian products I have integrated.

Pros

It comes with rich features, below are a few features which I personally liked:

1. Documentation: When there are some important knowledge articles that need to be shared with the team, we use this tool. It comes with multiple options to make the page feels catchy and rich, it also allows us to attach the images.

2. Search Functionality: When there are 1000s of confluence pages, and if I want to access the page containing a specific word or a line, the search engine works like a champ it finds the pages almost immediately, this feature really helps me in easing my office work.

3. It displays the name of the person who had created the page and last modified person name, this helps to know whom to reach out to when we need additional info pertaining to the details as written on the page. And if required we can add the approvals, thus whenever someone edits the document without your consent changes won't reflect others until you approve the updates.

4. Like and Comments: Similar to social media, readers can either hit like if they like the content or they can mention their feedback in the comment section, this feature really helped me while suggesting something to the author or express my thanks via a LIKE.

Cons

There should've been an option to keep the page in draft before publishing it. But unfortunately, there is no such feature in confluence.
Apart from this, I didn't find any other flaws in the software.

Pros

The rich text central location of document storage and the ability to share based on permissions is a nice-to-have tool for large companies or groups. Utilization is tricky as every team or group will use it in their own way and organize their own way so even if you implement this in your company and you're browsing another department's documentation, you will find essentially that it is just their own internal documentation which requires a little bit of a lucky search to find what you're looking for. Essentially this is a glorified document cloud storage which allows version control, permissions, and sharing.

Cons

It is not much different than say any other software or tool available in this category. It has some nice features like version control and seeing a complete history of who made changes to what along with comments and a social feature to it where you can subscribe but honestly there is so much more potential here especially from a company like Atlassian. I just feel they really dropped the ball here by not implementing better integration with some other apps which are already available. Example is that their spreadsheet implementation is a nightmare. The formatting almost always behaves irradicably and it has the bare minimum when it comes to these spreadsheets. Why not implement at least at the base of other offerings? For a paid product, the level of quality is expected to be much more.

Pros

The software is very easy to use for its most basic features - as a place to create and store content. It is a solid tool for a knowledge base or even project management. Macros allow creatively in how content is displayed and linked or mirrored from other pages. Users can control permissions, visibility and see a clear history of changes - which can be easily reverted back to if necessary. Page trees make it simple to navigate complex "spaces" of information and the search functionality is robust. Overall, a great place to develop content for internal collaboration and future reference.

Cons

Although Confluence is a great place to create and collaborate on content, it has a few major downfalls that are a constant source of frustration. The biggest issue relates to users working on the same page at the same time. This is a horrible experience at best. Content between users is frequently lost or overwritten and you can never be confident in if your content will save successfully and not disappear. When Confluence tries to merge changes, it often will lose content or simply not work at all. The result is users ensuring that only one person is editing at a time, which is a terrible annoyance and slows teams down. It often causes teams to actively collaborate in another tool where this is not an issue and then simply link to it through Confluence.

Pros

- Lots of visual tools for organizing information, as well as molding communications: gliffy diagrams, code blocks, cells, spreadsheets.
- Permissions model for segmenting information is greatly useful for organizations that create lots of documents and require some controls on searching and access to documents based on role.
- Web-based interface for administrators of Confluence is convenient for managing content, delegation and authorization work.
- There are many free software solutions in this sector of software, but generally require significant development to provide the value and features offered by confluence out of the box.
- Development and improvements continue to be deployed, Confluence has not been static
- Add-ons available through Atlassian marketplace to allow for further feature-adds for organization needs. I work in an IT environment, and diagrams for networks, software, process flows are invaluable for documentation purposes.
- Shortcut commands for savvy power users saves lots of time inserting tools and setting up formatting with ease, once you are aware them.

Cons

- Having used confluence for over 6 years, I have seen Confluence become more reliable with every update. At times, when something would go wrong with text formatting (bullet point indentation, for example), a power user could go to a tab of the document page you were working on, and edit the markup language of the page to correct the quirky formatting issue. This feature was removed. To the credit of Confluence, fixing such issues is less and less necessary, but power users like myself still miss it.
- The permissions models can be confusing at times, even for highly technical people supporting the software. I do not think this is an issue with Confluence, but rather, a caution to administrators who approach permissions from different eco-systems.

Pros

Confluence is an excellent tool for document management. It offers many features, including version control, access controls, and document organization. This makes it much easier to keep track of changes to important documents and manage them effectively. With Confluence, you can be sure that all your documents are stored securely and have complete control over who can access them. Whether you are working on a project or need to keep your records organized, Confluence is the perfect solution.

Cons

I've heard from some users that Confluence is lacking in some formatting and customization options. Specifically, some have reported that the platform lacks more advanced formatting capabilities, such as the ability to create multi-column layouts. Additionally, while Confluence allows for customization, it seems that the platform's options are somewhat limited compared to other document management tools.

Pros

I have to say that Confluence is an innovative solution that stand out from others of it's calliber in the market . Acquisition and implementation costs were within our budget range. It is also soo easy to use for everybody in our team thanks to it's UI that is perfectly tailored. Most of our work as the vet society in Vetcare Africa is usually outside the office and Confluence has to engage and collaborate as a team working on different rotation projects. It is remote friendly and centralize all the information in one space from tasks allocated to each one of us to projects from where we can coordinate and get status update on our peers as well as shared projects. It is therefore easy to get everyone at par across teams through comments, mentions and notification. It is also flexible enough with options to create plans with texts, tables, images etc . Imagine all of these in one single place and has customizable templates

Cons

I have not encountered any single dislike with Confluence. It is an easy to use tool that enhances collaboration by also integrating with tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive