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Alfresco vs Atlassian Confluence comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (8th), Document Management Software (3rd)
Atlassian Confluence
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (3rd), Knowledge Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Alfresco and Atlassian Confluence aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Alfresco is designed for Enterprise Content Management and holds a mindshare of 8.4%, up 7.5% compared to last year.
Atlassian Confluence, on the other hand, focuses on Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals), holds 14.6% mindshare, down 17.4% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
 

Featured Reviews

Karthi Keyan - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlining document management with enhanced digitalization features needed
We used Alfresco as a document management system for automating and digitizing manual forms. Those were the main use cases The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes has improved our organization. The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with…
Rabindra K Maharana - PeerSpot reviewer
Editing features improve document accessibility
There is a holiday calendar, however, I need to install an app or add something to it. The add-on feature is not readily available or well-documented. Guidance on this should be available in a forum. Recently, I used a feature in another tool—perhaps GitHub—where it helped prepare a chart. It involved listing resources, like having fifteen people in the X team, ten in the Y team, and seven in the Z team. It created a bar chart showing these numbers. This chart used AI to offer users the option to create it based on the data. It was then created on a separate page and made available.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with the scanning solution, the ability to search, and the capability to store and index to capture metadata."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"You can meet your users' expected features without having Alfresco's involvement."
"Document repository."
"The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes is also significant."
"The trial stages, the ability to connect it to Jira, and the ability to export in PDF are all good capabilities."
"Documenting everything related to the project is good for me. It enables me to use rich text to document, insert macros and links, highlight with different colors, and organize pages in a hierarchical way."
"For me, the most valuable feature is its high performance. It's crucial for us in the bank, as we handle a massive number of transactions every day."
"The solution is very intuitive and provides excellent content management."
"The sharing of information and simple formatting are valuable features. That is, there are no templates, and everything uses one format. This means that people don't need to worry about formatting."
"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 love the reports and the Confluence board."
"Atlassian Confluence is flexible and allows adding different types of context on the page and connecting a hypertext, like a web page, without a source."
 

Cons

"The configuration of Alfresco is a big challenge."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong. You have to make rules, such as one folder should not have more than 5,000 subfolders or children."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"Alfresco could improve workflow digitalization and enhance artificial intelligence capabilities."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"The setup process for Alfresco was complex."
"Confluence cannot replace Microsoft Word at the moment, so even though it can be used as a document management system, it is not meant for document creation, which adds a lot of limitations to it."
"There is room for improvement in maybe the tree structure for articles. If you have a lot of articles, it becomes difficult to navigate."
"An area for improvement in Atlassian Confluence is encouraging more vital interaction among the project members or users involved. I was researching a tool that could be used for better interactions offline among users on a specific topic or discussion. That feature would make Atlassian Confluence better."
"I have a couple of different pipelines that I work with. However, I'd like to see them displayed differently on the same dashboard. So, I would like to have a unified dashboard to view the different pipelines."
"An area for improvement would be the intuitiveness of using the features, especially if you want to customize."
"Some macros can be technical, and they are better managed on the Confluence cloud rather than on-premises. For example, when you add an image on the cloud, you can resize it just by using the mouse. This is not the case on-premises yet. You have to write pixels of the size of the image sometimes. Some of the very old macros are still there, and some of them are technical. It can be hard for users if they are not from an IT background to understand how to use them quickly."
"There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model."
"Atlassian needs to provide the source editor or a built-in plugin."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"The license for Alfresco is expensive - not the maximum, but close. There are also extra costs once you start building integrations, as implementation seems to be very costly."
"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"There are some cases where you can go on Confluence as a public site without a license, but you will not have all of the features. You can also have a Confluence site that does not require a license just to read the articles. When you have Jira Service Management attached to Confluence, then you can go through the portal of Jira Service Management and read the Confluence articles without the license. This is good because when you are in an ITSM environment, you have many customers, and you do not want them to have to pay just to read articles. Regarding the use of the full features of Confluence, there is a license cost, and it depends on how many users you want."
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"We pay $350 a month to use the solution."
"The issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons."
"We have to pay licensing fees."
"In my opinion, it's worth the investment"
"The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive."
"Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects. There is often a transition from the community version to the licensed version, which incurs migration costs. ...
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
Currently, the challenge is the general availability to users. Initially, they had poor documentation, but over the years, their documentation has highly improved. Initially, we had challenges find...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
This is mainly for unstructured document management systems with workflow and data classification.
What do you like most about Atlassian Confluence?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from its document-controlling feature. In Atlassian Confluence, controlled documents cannot be edited by anyone else.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian Confluence?
With Atlassian, the costs are reasonable. Although higher than before when we used multiple platforms and licenses, having a collaborative platform like this is advantageous. It streamlines license...
What needs improvement with Atlassian Confluence?
There is a holiday calendar, however, I need to install an app or add something to it. The add-on feature is not readily available or well-documented. Guidance on this should be available in a foru...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Confluence
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, IBM and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: August 2025.
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