Atlassian Confluence Reviews

There are some documents for users, some for developers, and some workspaces for projects, both in Jira and others for internal business processes within our company. It's not for customers, only for internal use.

The most valuable feature for me is the structure of documents. The page tree feature is more convenient for me.

There is room for improvement in terms of pricing.

I have been using this solution for around four years. 

It is a stable solution. We never faced any problem with stability.

The scalability is enough for our use cases. It covers all our needs. 

There was no problem with the setup process. 

When we started using Confluence, it was more convenient for us, but later, it became more expensive. Unfortunately, the data center version is expensive for us. So, it could be a bit cheaper.

In my opinion, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I use it as a knowledge base system for sharing knowledge and creating Kanban boards.

What I find the most valuable about Confluence is how easy it is to use. In addition, we have a lot of good clients and it can help us achieve a lot of things.

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.

I have been working with Atlassian Confluence for over five years.

The solution is quite stable. I give it an eight out of ten. 

The scalability of the solution is amazing. It supports a lot of pages and it's very helpful. I give it a nine out of ten. 

Approximately 300 people are using Atlassian Confluence within my business unit and there are around 1,000 users in the company. 

We haven't had many issues with the solution. Another team at our company handles the technical support, an IT expert who manages Confluence.

The initial setup is simple although it was not done by our team. We had a separate team do it for us.

When it comes to affordability, I give it an eight out of ten. It's reasonably priced since many people are using it.

Microsoft SharePoint is a bit fancier and can possibly achieve more complex things than Atlassian Confluence, but it's not easy to use. Confluence is simpler, and the integration with Jira is good.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I would definitely recommend it.

I primarily used this solution for IT documentation and documenting ISMS based on ISO 27001.

With the Confluence Wiki, I implemented quite a series of successful IT and Security Documentation projects. Confluence was my preferred product when starting any collaboration project that had to produce comprehensive, centrally organized, and highly usable documentation.

I worked on several projects that implemented an ISMS, based on the ISO 27001 standard, which mandates a "documented ISMS". I introduced Confluence as the tool to be used for that documentation.

I used Confluence as the "self-hosted" server in VMs or on MiniPCs running Linux. I always added backup methods, so the HA functionality of the much more expensive "datacenter-edition" was never needed. The largest environment I worked in had 100+ active authors, but typically I would work with the 10- or 25-user license, which are both quite affordable even for small customers and where the server resources are manageable (From two to four virtual cores and 4-16GB RAM will do fine).

This solution worked fine until Atlassian decided to force everybody into the cloud.

The most mentionable improvement is that documentation with Confluence gains a much better structure. Instead of hundreds of .doc and .xls files roaming the network shares and C: drives of team members, once you get Confluence set up, spend a few hours with all designated authors to define a few guidelines on how pages should look, be interlinked, and how to generally use the tool, the productiveness of creating and improving documentation is phenomenal!

The key is to take the mentioned few hours, get everybody together and produce a "style guide", for want of a better word, about how to use Confluence. Then agree on the top-level structure of your documentation and if everybody accepts this and uses it in their work, all is fine.

My recommendation is to meet for an hour every other week with those who work the most with the tool and fine-tune said "style guide" and the structure. This will help everybody to keep being motivated and to produce the best results. Also in such meetings, ideas about add-ons can be discussed and their integration planned.

Atlassian Confluence is a very good and seasoned Wiki Solution.

First and foremost, I want to mention its top-notch usability. It has a very intuitive user interface, which every user able to manage the basic functionality of a PC will be able to work with and produce quite satisfactory results.

There is a big and responsive community to help with questions and so far, Atlassian is still doing a good job to help.

Also, there are add-ons from various sources, which can be integrated with the product quite easily and have good chances to function together as a whole, like intended.

Another thing worth mentioning is the very good import and export functionality. You can just use Copy-Paste on a website or a document and Confluence will in most cases manage to reproduce the content quite recognizably. Export not only as XML, to be able to reimport, but also, PDF and Word DOCX work quite well. They can be further improved, speaking from personal experience with PDF files, by adding a few add-ons for formatting, page heading, and such.

Oh, and last but not least the flexibility should be mentioned. If for any reason there is the need to change the structure of the contents, say to move a branch of pages from one top-level area to another, just copy them or export them and re-import them in their own area. Mostly, that works without a glitch (exceptions prove the rule) and even cross-area-links will continue to work. For more complicated restructuring, one can always use the XML-Export and load it into an XML-Editor. Of course, that´s for people who can read and understand XML structure.

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.

We have been using Atlassian Confluence for approximately five years.

No complaints that I know of - unless some admin shoots the underlying VM (has been heard to happen), confluence is just rock-solid. To be sure: It needs some resources, and if the VM starves of memory or CPU, performance and stability will suffer.

As I said, the largest environment i was working with at a customer has 100+ authors and I imagine plenty of pages and other content - sadly I do not know the exact figures - but we never had reason to complain in our project which only consisted of 12 people actively using Confluence. So I guess scalability should not be an issue.

Prior to Confluence, I tried working with Microsoft SharePoint. Well, there were those sad tries, and my advice is to forget it.

SharePoint may have advantages when it comes to organize and share files, but the ease and intuitive way to create structured documentation just is not there.

And as a sidenote: When working on projects we would oftentimes edit a page in confluence with three or four of us concurrently updating table entries or text segments. Very seldom have I experienced problems with allowing concurrent edits and in my mind never incorrect merging of inputs. Again, that is true for the on-premises self-hosted version, in the cloud that does not work quite as well.

And why do I point this out: Have any of you tried to edit a word document in MS Teams concurrently? ... it produces quite funny effects but in my opinion cannot be trusted, really.

The cases where I set up the server myself were straightforward and went without any glitch along the documented steps.

Up until now I only had inhouse admins implement the servers, they did it noiselessly and with satisfying results.

Erm. ROI. Hm. Can anybody please call the finance guy? ...

Well, that´s difficult now. Until the end of 2020, using a self-hosted server, have one of your IT-Admins set it up, costs $10 a year for the 10-Author license.

Nowadays? Don´t use it. The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive.

To be honest, after being introduced to Confluence by a colleague all those years ago, I did not evaluate any other option in earnest.

Recently, I started looking at Tiki Wiki, which is a fully OpenSource alternative, but I haven´t gotten around to installing it or using it in a new project.

I would not consider alternatives but for the policy of Atlassian. Such a good product should run in every datacenter. NOT in the Clouds, though.

My advice for everybody is to flame Atlassian into re-providing the self-hosted server version!

I use it for documentation, project reports, and creating a knowledge base. 

It's used for building a knowledge base and providing status updates on tasks.

I don't see many features in the version we use. We do find the ability to build workflow diagrams helpful, but that might be through external modules/plugins.

The diagram tool is a positive addition.

However, the only integration we use is with Jira.

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.

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

It seems highly scalable. There are 500 end users using this solution. 

We have IT, service desk agents, and regular users across different functions. Everyone is using it. For example, if someone needs to look up documentation or assistance with workflows, they would use Confluence.

It's used alongside Jira. Each team would likely have a Jira code for that purpose.

I've used ClickUp. It's a good tool, especially compared to Jira. Confluence still has room to improve in comparison. We also used a legacy tool called CBQ.

ClickUp is becoming a real competitor to Jira and Confluence because it's an all-in-one tool. You don't need separate licenses for project management and knowledge bases. ClickUp has a more seamless experience.  

I've heard of Asana, but I personally prefer ClickUp. If I were starting a company from scratch, I would consider ClickUp over Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc. It's really user-friendly.

I would recommend using this solution. It's not necessarily better than tools like Asana, but it gets the job done.

Jira and Confluence have strong market presence, and migrating existing systems can be a challenge. 

For new projects, I would certainly recommend considering other options. For established teams, switching tools might not be practical. But if you're starting fresh, explore alternatives and don't just default to Jira and Confluence.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We use Atlassian Confluence for project documentation. It works as a repository of documents. We can write documents, including tutorial information, technical manuals, and other company procedures.

The product has a valuable feature for quick verification of documents.

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.

We have been using Atlassian Confluence for one and a half years.

The product is very stable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

We have 125 Atlassian Confluence users in our organization. We use the tool every day. I rate its scalability a seven out of ten. The lack of a collaboration feature affects the scalability level.

I have used SharePoint before.

I rate Atlassian Confluence a six out of ten. I advise others to look for other tools if they want a feature for collaboration.

We use it to manage different documentation such as PDFs and PowerPoint. It's similar to Dropbox but is more organized. We have approximately 1,000 users that make use of this solution in our business. 

The customization that Confluence offers is one of its most useful features. You can customise it based on the specific project you are working on. It also supports multiple languages. 

I also like using the web browser version of this solution and the fact that it is easy to search. You are able to see more that ten rows of results. 

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.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability. 

This is a scalable solution. It is built on a crop base and so adding additional documents is simple. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

This is a very expensive solution. 

We compared this solution with Lark and I think Lark is a better option. When using Confluence, you can only search using a search bar. When using Lark, you can search through a messaging bot and everything is translated. For example, Chinese words can be translated into English without requiring AI. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. It is one of the most well known solutions but comes at a high price and does not offer the best functionality. 

I use Confluence for project documentation and team collaboration.

With Confluence, everything is in one place, so it's easy to find documentation. This means we don't need to use other tools, like SharePoint.

Confluence's best features are very easy content writing and publishing. It also has good integration with other Atlassian products, Jira in particular.

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.

I've been using Confluence for a few years.

Confluence is stable and dependable.

Confluence's scalability is good and can handle many parallel users.

Atlassian's technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was easy and happened in the background.

We used an Atlassian support company for the initial deployment.

Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics.

I would recommend Confluence to other users because it's easy to use and integrates well with other documentation tools. I would give Confluence a rating of eight out of ten.

We are using it for collaboration, team communication, documentation portal, and sometimes project-related content. We keep the details of the project and related documents.

It is a good collaboration tool. You share the document content and also its history through Atlassian Confluence so that you can trace its development. Also, you can add comments to the project-related items in order to track the history. It has JIRA integration in a way that you can combine the project-related dashboards into one space. This increases the communication between the teams. It is a good way to record know-how basis. You can use it as a know-how base for newcomers to be initiated more easily to the items provided.

It is easy to use and create new page content. It has macros and some stamp dates for your projects. If you would like to make something new that you have not done before, it is usually easy to find out on the internet. There is a lot of information available and the search function is excellent. You can search in different spaces and get answers for items you want to find easily.

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.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for almost four years.

It is very stable. I have not seen any virus interruption or issue related to the stability.

I would say that Atlassian Confluence is scalable we have more than one thousand users.

Currently, I have not contacted technical support.

We implemented it through a third party.

We went with Atlassian Confluence because JIRA had the same type of usage.

If you need to create some teamwork spaces it is very good. I would rate Atlassian Confluence a nine out of ten.