Atlassian Confluence Reviews and Pricing

it_user174663

Systems/Applications Specialist with 201-500 employees

Feb 19, 2015

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I like that we don't need to wait until a document is 100% ready, we can start with a draft and develop in progress.

What is most valuable?

Easy import and creation of new documents
Notifications of the updated content
Version history changes
Cross team changing

How has it helped my organization?

Before using Confluence we have had the documentation spread across multiple shared drives and emails. Confluence gave us a chance to re-arrange the documents into a single repository and group the information logically in home page(s). I have called our home page a one-stop-shop for all team related links. Furthermore, other teams have created their own home pages and we are able to access each other spaces, sharing knowledge and know-how. When we do project work we can share the progress and develop documentation on the go while everyone has access to the latest version in real time. Talking about this, the thing I love about Confluence is that every document becomes a living document and we don't need to wait until it is 100% ready, but start with a draft and develop in progress.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for over two years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues faced with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The software has been running as expected. We have faced an issue where the hard disk ran out of space and the application continued working, putting all the changes in the memory. We have identified this fact after a server restart and as a result the changes made in the last few weeks were lost (the current RAM setups are huge enough to store plenty of text based information). I believe a simple space utilisations could be implemented in the app to warn or stop it from working if there is no space. In my opinion, the impact of losing the work is bigger than having the app down until fixed.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

As above plus the available users are based on license.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

I find the customer sevice limited.

Technical Support:

Technically speaking they have just enough resources to confirm bugs and lack of functionality but no people to follow on fixing and improving.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

First of its kind in this environment.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward install and setup.

What about the implementation team?

Implemented in-house. Quick and painless.

What was our ROI?

Confluence has saved time in finding information, reduced the on-boarding time, improved provisioning of repeatable scripted operational process, provided a central point for knowledge sharing and supplied better retention of Intellectual Property.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Not sure about the initial cost but the application itself needs little computing and some disk space.

What other advice do I have?

Go fast, cheap and dirty when creating new documents and improve in progress - this tool concentrates on the sharing, arranging and collaboration part but doesn't aim too high about how the content looks like. If you are after some serious functionality such as a table of contents, body styles and track changes I would recommend using Word and attach as a doc file. Index your content in home pages and sub-home pages for better logical arrangement of the information and fast navigation. Research additional modules like Confluence Questions. You can use the spaces for team building management like having a section for photos from events, out of work activities or sharing industry related links.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user165711

CEO with 51-200 employees

Nov 30, 2014

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Reduces redundant communication. Working with 3rd party content can be improved.

What is most valuable?

Content creation and sharing, collaboration

How has it helped my organization?

Reduced redundant communication and overall better communication among knowledge workers

What needs improvement?

Working with 3rd party content i.e. MS office, PDF files, email integration

For how long have I used the solution?

6 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Social adoption - it is always tricky to change current way-of-doing things you are bringing a new culture of collaboration and working with information.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Haven't had any issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Haven't had any issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Filesystem and email, we switched because it was not a effective way of collaborating in teams.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward

What about the implementation team?

In-house

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Initial 50K USD, cloud-based infrastructure cost + maintenance = 30k / year

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes - all wiki and collaboration platforms available

What other advice do I have?

Just do it, it will give you quick benefits and will change the overall atmosphere when doing things together in one place. Here's an example of ours:

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're an Atlassian Confluence expert partner

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it_user11370

Director of Operations at a cloud solution provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 27, 2013

Confluence 5 brings a fresh UI

Only just recently did I share our experience with migrating our internal custom KB system to Atlassian Confluence. We’ve been using it for a significant period of time, and our team are making good use of the Confluence wiki. Our team is using it for project planning, documentation, setup guides, known issues, bug tracking, reports and more.

I also personally run my own starter edition wiki for my own personal use, plus I can generally trial new plugins and new releases quicker on my own personal wiki.

I also recently wrote an article about the Evernote plugin and during my research I was aware that Confluence 5 was close to being released. Then just recently I got an email from Atlassian announcing the release of Confluence 5, I quickly added a task to get my personal wiki upgraded to Confluence 5 ASAP, so I could check out the new features.

The email Atlassian sent out made it clear that a new user interface had been rolled in to this release, so I was interested to see what had changed.

Today I am just going to take you through a quick introduction to some of the new features in Confluence 5.

UI Improvements

One of the main focus’s of this upgrade was an overhaul of the user interface (the look and feel). On first login after the upgrade you can not miss that changes. I was greeted with the new ui and a welcome message with a link to a video about the new confluence ui.

blog-conf-1

There is always going to be some issues when changing that UI mainly for the end users. I think the video is a great touch to bring people up to speed.

Worth noting is if you read through the Upgrade Notes for this release, Atlassian have taken the time to create a whole section on how to prepare your end users. This is a great touch. As with all new things, sometimes change can be scary.

Atlassian have provided video’s and notes on these big changes. Giving you (the person in charge of upgrading / training) the content necessary to educate your team. Planning for Confluence 5 - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Planning+for+Confluence+5

Create Button

Previously with prior releases of Confluence if you wanted to add a new page, blog post etc, you browsed to the particular space, then selected the Add button and chose your options.

This has now been replace with a single “Create” button in the top banner. From here you can create a new blank page, page from template, blog post etc and choose what space / page to put it under.

blog-conf-2

I think this is a great idea. A one stop location for getting your creating content. Simpler and more efficient.

New Side Bar

Confluence 5 has introduced a side bar when you are browsing spaces or pages. The side bar can be customized to include shortcuts to your favorite or frequently used space’s or page.

It also provide a navigation for child pages depending on what space / page you are viewing.

blog-conf-3

So when I am browsing my setup notes space, you can see that it provides quick access to some of the pages that are available.

They have moved the space options to the side bar as well instead of cluttering up the top bar, this is a positive move to reduce the clutter in the top bar. This side bar has replaced the older “Browse” men option.

Editor Improvements

Although I have not heavily tested this yet, when editing a page I noticed the load time once you hit “Edit” has improve dramatically.

Atlassian have got some serious speed improvements for the Editor in Confluence 5. The editor has also experienced some UI changes to maximise screen space.

Conclusion

Though this is early days getting familiar with Confluence 5, I have no major complaints just yet. The new UI is fresh and so far easy to use. The speed improvements are noticeable and my current favorite plugin (Evernote Plugin) still works in Confluence 5.

I have one little gripe so far though, Confluence 5 introduces “round” space logos. So if you are upgrading an existing Confluence install, you may need to review your logo’s for spaces, as they may get a little ruined or look a bit funny after they have been “rounded”. Not sure why Atlassian chose the round logo approach, it is a minor issue though, but some logos do not fit in a round shape, so would of been good to “choose” the shape.

From reading through the Confluence 5 release notes, there are a large number of other changes. If you are curious to see them all here are some useful links,

Planning for Confluence 5 - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Planning+for+Confluence+5
Confluence 5 Release Notes - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+5.0+Release+Notes
Confluence 5 Upgrade Notes - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+5.0+Upgrade+Notes
Confluence Whats New Page - https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/confluence/whats-new/confluence-50

Now I have to start planning the upgrade of our Crucial Confluence Wiki, so the team can benefit from this new release.

I would love to hear from anyone who has upgraded already. Feel free to share your thoughts on the new release.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Jan 11, 2014

I used Confluence 5 and I enjoyed its new features. From my point of view, the best feature is the intuitive space sidebar, which appears on every page and is intended to display the most likely content users want to access. The aim is to reduce the need for searching and to help orientate users. I also like the real-time updates, which are pulled into the page automatically rather than requiring a page refresh, and the responsive design, which adjusts to the size of the browser. Let's not forget about the new global header, which provides speedy access to other Atlassian apps, spaces, calendars ans settings.

it_user11370

Director of Operations at a cloud solution provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 14, 2013

Our shift to Confluence

For a long, long, long, long, long time Crucial has operated a custom made web based internal knowledge base / documentation area which has fallen well out of date. Though web based and coded in PHP we have since out grown its simplicity.

Our team regularly felt the pain of trying to locate, update or add information.

Finally we hit a point where we had to take action, so we put the word out to our team to come up with some possible third party options to replace our internal kb area.

We received replies with a number of suitable options.

At this point we realized that we really needed to sit down and come up with our requirements. We could then use the requirements to help compare the solutions and make a final decision.

The team bumped heads and came up with a relativity straight forward list of features and requirements.

Our replacement wiki needed,

Excellent search functionality.
Permissions at a per page basis.
Easy to use layout.
To be easy to find information in.
Search uploaded documents (nice to have)
Ability to upload files such as PDF, Images, Zips.
Ability to move pages, articles around and change names.
Ability set descriptive titles / names.
WSIWYG editor for creating pages / documents.
Version Control for a document / page.
Able to structure information and modify layout of system.
Local install (not a hosted solution)

Some of those options were quite basic, but essential to how we wanted to run our wiki.

We then went through the process of comparing all the viable Wiki solutions against our list of requirements.

Tiki Wiki

TikiWiki ticked a lot of the boxes that made up our criteria. Good search, permissions, upload files, version control, and the expected WSIWYG editor. However what turned us off this solution was the look and feel.We strongly believe the wiki should be easy on the eyes, and the layout should be a breeze to work with. Many of our testers did not find it met those needs.

KBPublisher

KB Publisher was another great option. It met most of our needs, with a great search function, positive comments about how easy it was to use and all the usual features you would expect from a wiki solution.

BrainKeeper

Straight away we ruled this out because brain keeper was not able to be locally installed, you had to use it hosted on their infrastructure. While this is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your budget, we prefer to keep our wiki locally run.We still went through the testing process however, and found this solution to be very feature rich. One disappointing note was it had a page version control, but you couldn’t revert to a previous version, just see the changes.

MindTouch

MindTouch was an interesting offering. From a feature set perspective it had a large list of features, a good portion we had no use for. We considered this a disadvantage as it meant there was a lot of bloat or unnecessary functionality.We came to the decision that this was not a suitable option as the layout was not user friendly which we believe was as a result of the large list of features.

We then got on with testing Atlassian Confluence. Immediately the feedback from our testers was very positive. Great layout, easy to use, ticked all our feature requirements and a search function that was exactly what we were after!

Confluence had all the bits we needed plus more! A recurring comment was on the WSIWYG editor used when creating pages / documents, the editor in Confluence is amazing. With drag and drop ability for adding images and documents, as well as easy to use shortcuts.

Further to our decision Confluence has an excellent documentation area for users and admins alike. Along with that Atlassian offer an interactive and video based training area called Atlassian University.

Personally I have worked with Confluence in previous roles, and already had made my mind up, but to avoid to much bias we still let the team vote and give feedback.

Confluence was chosen as our new wiki replacement!

6 months later…..

We’ve been running Confluence now for about 6 months. We are on the end part of a migration to migrate all our old articles from our legacy system and could not be happier! We took our time moving the articles across because we wanted to verify each article and make sure it was worth moving!

Since going live with Confluence we have started using it quite heavily for our project documentation, internal tech support documentation and a large number of our team members are making great use of the persona spaces for their own notes, documents and general shenanigans.

At the time of deployment we went live with Confluence 4.1 and it was great, since then Confluence has now gone to Confluence 4.3 which has added a couple of features worth noting, including a WSIWYG editor for the Global Templates area.

We are looking forward to Confluence 5 and some of the new UI changes they are bringing in!

If you have any questions about why we moved to Confluence, or wondering about our experience in using Confluence so far, please feel free to leave a comment.

Disclaimer: The company I work for is partners with several vendors

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user9330

Owner at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Sep 11, 2013

Confluence and Salesforce Chatter

I use Confluence for sales support as an extranet, where I publish pages that can be viewed by anonymous users. Sometimes with permissioning to specific sets of customers. They don t need to have individual logins. A collective login and password may be enough. If I want to interact with them relative to a specific content (means, it s a content-centric interaction), then I ask them to use comments on Confluence. If the interactions are related to some opportunity or pre-sale, then I call them to interact on Salesforce Chatter.

Now, although I haven t experimented yet, I believe that a great integration would be to publish Salesforce reports on a Confluence page, so that users of the reports don t need individual SF licences and can view them (and comment them) on Confluence. Does it make sense for you?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user9318

Program Mananger at a university with 10,001+ employees

Sep 10, 2013

Confluence vs. Blackboard Learn

Both Confluence and Blackboard Learn have the capability to utilize wikis for instruction. Depending on the features you need, one may be better for your course than the other. Wikis in Blackboard Learn have a direct tie in to all of blackboard’s features, especially the grade book. However Confluence has a greater overall feature set, thereby making it a much more powerful wiki tool.

Below is a wiki comparative grid between these two applications.

Features	Confluence	Blackboard Learn wiki
Viewable to Public	Yes, if wanted	No (only to individual classes)
Content hierarchy control	Yes	No
Wiki lifespan	Beyond life of course	Only life of course
Individual user access control	Yes	Yes, but must have admin. create
Groups	Yes, but must have admin. create	Yes
Wiki mark-up supported	Yes	No
Rich text editing	Yes	Yes
Direct BB grade book access	No	Yes
History – Track users	Yes	Yes
Student created pages	Yes	Yes
Threaded -Commenting	Yes	Yes
Embed video	Yes	Yes
Embed PDF, Word, or PPT files	Yes	No
Attach documents	Yes	Yes
Blogging	Yes	Yes, but external to wiki

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user2544

Developer at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 20, 2013

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Decent Wiki Functionality, Awful Search

Valuable Features:

It's relatively easy to use, and has a lot of functionality with regard to formatting wiki articles and embedding content.

Room for Improvement:

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.

Other Advice:

Overall it's a fine tool, but I don't think it provides a whole lot of advantages over other similar options. We use it primarily because we also use JIRA, and working with one vendor makes things easier.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user107157Alliances Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

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May 5, 2014

Our company extensively uses confluence for creating groups of all kinds. At times it can be difficult to find information due to too many meaning-less groups that have been created by users and the abuse of too much useless information being posted. I would recommend user guidelines for posting information and administration for removing groups that are not being used and to monitor whats being posted. Also, the search function still is not very good.

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it_user2832

Customer Communication Specialist at a media company with 51-200 employees

Nov 22, 2012

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Easy to use, but tough time importing Word.

Valuable Features:

It is very easy to use and setup. The Word import works well (except for styling issues). Users can collaborate and you can allow certain users to see certain content dynamically. Many plugins are offered. The most useful one is to generate PDF on the fly. You also have send this page, print, etc. If you do not require log ins (only allow anonymous users), I would highly recommend Confluence.

Room for Improvement:

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.