Atlassian Confluence Reviews

The fact that Confluence is a wiki that allows near WYSIWYG editing. Having an “easy to use” product means that users have a “low threshold” to use it. This is very important, as the value of any information store is that of the data that is put in to it.

The ease of use makes it accessible for all users. Users are able to insert/edit information without having to have wiki knowledge. We can put any “static” information in Confluence. “Static” meaning that the information does not change on a daily basis. The strong search function let’s us find stored information rapidly.
We store customer information, work processes, to do’s, best practices, etc.

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.

I have been using Confluence for five years.

We have not noticed any stability issues.

The pricing model is too steep for us to really use it for everything.

Technical support is generally very good. I must say though, that Atlassian’s success has made the company less flexible with respect to responding to users wishes and requirements. I have had several issues/demands that I found I was not alone in. On most occasions, there where one or more support issues in the Atlassian support portal and more and more, people complain about not being heard.

I have not used another solution before.

Having a cloud solution, setup is easy. Being somewhat of an expert from using Atlassian products for years, I know where to look. For novice users, I’ve been told that not everything is easy to find.

My advise to Atlassian is to offer a less steep model and also offer “read-only access” for non-paying users. We currently are looking for a second product to use in a situation where we need to offer access to 40-50 read-only customers.

I started using Confluence when we started with JIRA. Therefore, I did not evaluate other products.

Confluence Cloud is especially easy to get started with. With $10 a month for 10 users, it is pretty cheap. You have to keep in mind, however, that the pricing changes dramatically when the user count goes up. New users should think about what they may need later, when they start.

The valuable features are:

• It is easy to use.
• It is easy for newcomers to start using it.
• It has the “what you see is what you get” functionality of MS Word.
• It is easy to move pages around. There is no excuse for not doing documentation just because you do not know where to add it.
• It has good integration with JIRA. You can really do great things with the two products.

The license part is too flexible.

We have been using this solution since 2008.

There have not been any stability issues.

There have not been many scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 9 out of 10.

We used SharePoint a long time ago, and we will never go back to it.

The installation can be quite complex. You need to know what you are doing in order to install it on your own. The cloud version is very easy to install.

You need to buy a full license for your entire organization, even though you only need a plugin for two people.

There needs to be an owner of the installation, in terms of the system and the infrastructure.

Built in revision history and document management makes this ideal for companies without a dedicated document controller, and makes life significantly easier for document controllers who are using paper-based systems.

I've used Confluence as a Quality Management System at several companies; traditional QMS’s need pretty dedicated management by a document controller to make sure revision history is maintained, changes go through an adequate approval process, and only the latest approved versions of documents are being used. Confluence essentially handles all of that, which means companies without the means for a dedicated document controller can still implement a QMS, and/or companies with a document controller benefit from the added efficiencies.

Really speeds up creation and approval of policies and procedures and provides a centralized area for users to access current versions of documents.

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.

Confluence is very easy to use and a range of third party add-ons to add more capabilities for power users. Highly recommended to any organization as a way of breaking down silos and sharing information more effectively across teams and departments. I often call it "Wikipedia blended with Facebook for the organization".

Prior to my organization adopting Confluence, email was everything. Internal knowledge sharing was always an email, which would get lost in everyone's inbox, along with all the "Reply All" comments. Now, any information worth sharing is posted to Confluence, with threaded comments making future research and referencing far more effective.

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.

Categories, document editing and creation, the great permission system, awesome plugin management.

Confluence allows creating new documentation very fast. This allowed us to organize our self-written documentation in a very efficient way.

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.

I have been using it for almost two years.

Deployment can be painful when you have to deal with different Java versions or keystores. The rest is very simple since there is a very good install and upgrade wizard.

No, Confluence turned out to be very stable.

No, not yet.

I didn't get in touch with Atlassian yet. But they have an awesome wiki and Q&A section.

I was using several open source wiki systems, all of them lacked the great ACL and plugin system of Confluence.

It was straight forward.

I implemented it myself.

The more users you have, the more money you will spend. Make sure to give only those users access who really need it.

Make sure to run backups by dumping the database and saving the Confluence home on nightly basis.

The flexibility and scalability of Confluence.

The structure of spaces, pages and child pages allows an easy way to structure content in a way which suits our business.

Confluence has been our central knowledge platform for several years. All of our agent team use the knowledge base constantly throughout their work.

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.

3 years

We had no issues with deployment.

We had no issues with stability.

Just in respects of how we structure our content. Confluence is perfectly scalable.

Responsive and to the point. Also extensive knowledge base which is useful for most queries.

10/10

We implemented in house with (at the time) limited technical expertise.

Hosting yourself allows greater flexibility in terms of extensions and customisation.

1. Its ability to display data from an excel sheet attached to the page. A simple one line code can do this.

2. Allows markers in the page so that they can be referenced in other pages thereby avoiding duplication.

3. Allows creation of random tables when needed for representation.

4. Allows document attachments to be visible as a link whose display text can be user-defined.

This became the primary location where all knowledge documents and other documentation were recorded and held. Its ability to allow creation of child pages helped to nest topics within topics

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.

5 years

Deployment was handled by the client's infrastructure team. I'm unable to comment on this.

Yes. JIRA to confluence connectivity was a nagging issue. To circumvent this, we started using JIRA dumps into excel and uploading them to the Confluence page.

None

I'm unable to comment on this.

I'm unable to comment on this.

Confluence was already used as the primary tool for reporting and documentation.

However, there have been Sharepoint based solutions for holding documents and their version which I did not find as user-friendly as Confluence.

The other option, of course, is to maintain your documents in a configuration management tool like Visual Safe Source.

Deployment and setup was handled by the client's infrastructure team. I'm unable to comment on this

Deployment was handled by the client's infrastructure team. I'm unable to comment on this.

I'm unable to comment on this.

We did not particularly evaluate other tools, but when compared with VSS and Sharepoint based solutions, Confluence would be an easy choice. This depends on what exactly is your purpose of using this tool. My views are based on its use as a tool for documentation and a QA's perspective on it.

The ease at which any employee can curate content and the ease in which people can discover meaningful and important information to get their job done.

We are hard core users so there are a lot of examples: At HomeAway we have product development teams for our sites, they use confluence both to document product roadmaps, and for the integration with JIRA to relay to stakeholders the updated status. It is the only place people go at HomeAway to get information.

The ability to delegate administrative roles, very difficult to give someone delegated administrative ability – almost all or nothing.

My company has been working with Atlassian for 6 years.

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

No. We were having issues but that was because we hadn’t configured properly.

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Formerly used Sharepoint – we like that Confluence has higher usability for the user so we can democratize content creation.

I was not here for the initial setup, but the upgrades setup is complex for us mainly because cloning the environment for testing is complex.

I would definitely not just purchase and install – engage with an expert, there is a lot of power in using Confluence and you need expert guidance to use it all properly.

• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Smooth integration with JIRA

This is our corporate wiki, all departments use it for process and knowledge management. We implemented a 'control center' in Confluence using the JIRA integration for both Change Control and Incident Management.

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.

I've used it for three years.

It's an on-demand service.

There's been a few outages, but nothing significant.

It's an on-demand service.

It's not needed often, but they are responsive when issues are reported.

It's not needed often, and when they are, there's a good integration of reported issues to the backlog.

At a previous job we were beginning to use SharePoint, I am not an expert.

Confluence setup is very straightforward, but an absence of formal training availability caused it to take longer than it should have to become productive.

It was done in-house.

I don't have a specific number for it, but I consider it to be extensive, given the low cost and widespread use of this tool.

We are using the on-demand version and our pricing is fixed.

I would recommend you consider a managed hosting arrangement instead of on-demand, because of the limitations. I would also recommend a clear plan be developed for content structure and ownership.

Configurability, modern web application, and the large community.

Thorough tracking and logging of actions (Nothing gets lost), far fewer office files sent around by collaborating online, instant availability of information.

• A lot of bugs already reported to Atlassian are not addressed.
• Avatars must be square.
• Status lozenges must offer more than three colors.

5 years.

No issues with deployment.

Yes. Both applications do not recover from loss of database server connection. Even if DB server is back online, applications need a restart.

Up to now it performs ok. We are at 300,000 issues. Getting the impression that it will get tight now.

As an Enterprise Customer the service is not sufficient. Our concerns are not being addressed. Active visits at our site would be appreciated to explain our issues.

Did not need it yet.

We switched because it was the better product for a lesser price.

Initial setup was straightforward.

In-house team.

At the time it was $8000 one off and $4000 yearly maintenance. Atlassian forced to switch to Enterprise licenses which doubled the cost.

Mantis.

Be prepared that functionality of today might be changed or removed or charged separately without being asked. Bugs can be reported but are often not addressed for years. Atlassian may make major design decisions not considering their customers needs and requirements.