Atlassian Confluence Reviews

Implementing Confluence in documenting functional specifical documents and preparing RTMs, product requirements.

It has tremendously improved our organisational culture, as it is a more streamlined way of handling customer issues/responses/queries and for documenting.

Integration with JIRA, draw.io, Creately, and other mockups tools is a boon to Confluence's usage in handling complex problems.

Confluence textual editor could be improved and integrated with MS Word for easy usage and better formatting of documents.

It is indeed a stable and error-free application, as it is a mature application running for decades.

It can be easily scaled up to different levels if used wisely.

Quick support with an easy resolution.

N/A.

Straightforward.

In-house.

N/A.

• It's easy to set up, as it gives a quick guide for the same process.
• Costing and pricing may vary depending on usage.

N/A.

N/A.

We used Confluence to coordinate products with our engineering and marketing teams. This allowed us to easily convey project details across our worldwide development and marketing teams.

Confluence improved our communication and collaboration allowing everyone relevant to the discussion to provide their feedback while allowing managers to easily sift through the conversation to make strategic decisions.

The ability to customize fields to allow for both qualitative and quantitative data discussions allowed us to back up our "gut feelings" with data collected from the industry and our customers.

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.

There are two use cases for using Confluence wiki:

• Team notes
• Software documentation.

Wiki is a simple tool for developers to write and record team decisions explaining the product that they are creating. 

The best features are the following:

• Automated TOC
• Horizontal tabbing option
• Expanding drop down lists
• Easy image integration
• Access to the underlying HTML
• The list of macros in the drop down.

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.

No issues.

No issues.

Never tried to contact them. There is a lot of info on the web about Confluence wiki if you need help.

Wiki has been used for a long time at my company. Many people enjoy its zero learning-curve.

In-house.

Wiki is a good solution for non-tech writers. It is easy to learn and has a number of good features. The writing does not live beside the code, like GitHub Markdown does, nor does the wiki editor contain advanced editing features, like MindTouch, Oxygen, and other DITA editors. However, its simplicity encourages non-writers to document what they are doing.

Makes integration with other softwares or plugins easier.

User interface (UI) could be improved.

Began using it in the last year.

No, we did not face issues with deployment.

No, we did not face issues with stability.

No, we did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Their customer service is good.

A nine out of 10.

We were looking for comprehensive solution, so we tried Confluence.

We implemented the solution in-house. It was implemented with limited expertise.

No. We did not evaluate other options.

Confluence works as a trunk for our documentations and instructions, and a help centre for our telephone contact centre.

One and a half years.

No, Atlassian's documentation is very good.

No, the product works stably.

No, the product has scalability up to 2000 users.

Atlassian's service desk is very friendly.

They quickly resolve all of our problems.

We used IBM Connections. It is a very interesting solution, but Confluence is more flexible (maybe because it has many add-ons in its ecosystem).

Some of our installation work was "from the box", when the business requirement was standard. If the business requirement wasn't standard, we customized Confluence and added add-ons to it.

Atlassian has powerful documentation, and even a weak sysadmin could implement Confluence.

Pricing and licensing is friendly, but every year the price increases 5-10%.

The flexibility, well-rounded features, and capabilities to support the different needs of the organization.

JIRA has allowed my organization to aggregate our entire portfolio into one system and to eliminate five other disparate solutions.

The addition of Confluence allowed us to take the aggregation a big step forward by adding project and support documentation into one central holistic repository.

There are certain features, like AD FS and workflows, that don't appear to be mature enough for Enterprise use.

JIRA and Confluence (latest): Two years.

We started on cloud and moved to server. This caused some big errors with database issues and macros not working due to leftover items from the cloud. I recommend the server version overall. It is more fully-featured and scalable.

We ostensibly moved from cloud to server, because of functionality not being available on cloud, but also because there are storage limits that don't support enterprise level usage on the cloud.

Atlassian technical support is responsive in terms of communication, but is slow to address issues. You often have to constantly advocate for your needs to get them addressed or triaged.

Our organization had many different solutions for PPM. We switched to Atlassian to consolidate our PPM as well as to support the introduction of Agile into the organization.

You should initially use consulting to make good decisions about architecting this product. Also, designating at least two SMEs to be dedicated to the setup and enhancements is key.

Make sure to have passion for solving problems. Atlassian has solutions, you just need to figure out which ones to apply. Also, try to keep your admin group small, don't open it up to more than a few people. Finally, start with a pilot and get it working before rolling it out to everyone.

Availability of documents hosted in confluence very easily. You only need a browser, so even on a smartphone it is available.

Centralisation of knowledge, easily searchable.

Being robust when dealing with complex pages, eating too much CPU, badly designed plugins.

Nine years.

Yes, if users upload/convert from complex Office documents or upload too many attachments.

Not yet.

It depends on the issue and the support agent handling the case. Sometimes it is super good, sometimes super lame.

No previous wiki solution.

Initial setup is easy‎. The Atlassian documentation is good. Just make sure to read the requirements description.

No advice, pricing is publicly available.

• Do not install too many plugins, and choose them well, since some are heavy or broken.
• Do not allow attachment uploads that are too big.
• Install JavaMelody for easier monitoring‎.
• PostgreSQL is a good DB choice for all Atlassian products.
• Use fast HDD disk for faster search results.

One of the valuable features is Confluence and JIRA integration. The most valuable integration feature between JIRA and Confluence was being able to easily link Jira tickets to Confluence pages and vice-versa. They felt quite seamless. This reduced work friction, and prevented jumping between systems. It is simple, but very useful. The more integration the better, such as the integration with Slack.

The tool improved team collaboration around a usable source of truth.

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.

We have been using this solution on and off for five years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We used SharePoint and Wikis. They were hard work and had poor integration.

The initial setup was easy. We used SaaS.

Slowly release to users and add subscriptions. Keep on top of subscribers and remove idle/inactive users.

We did not evaluate other options.

Just do it.