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Atlassian Confluence vs Office 365 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

Atlassian Confluence
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (2nd), Knowledge Management Software (1st)
Office 365
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
130
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Atlassian Confluence is designed for Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) and holds a mindshare of 15.8%, down 19.3% compared to last year.
Office 365, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 6.5% since last year.
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Gary Cook - PeerSpot reviewer
Access to advanced features boosts productivity despite pricing concerns in developing regions
I need to do maintenance for Office 365 very seldom, once a year. In the maintenance process for Office 365, we have about 12 people involved. For the maintenance side of Office 365, only one person is involved. Looking at Office 365's pricing, I would give it a 4 on a scale from 1 to 10. My overall rating for Office 365 is an 8 out of 10, but for the product itself, I would give it a 10. I would definitely recommend Office 365 to other businesses, probably a 9 out of 10 for recommendation. This is only because of its price and the fact that they do not take into account developing countries such as South Africa, where they should give us more favorable prices or local prices. We do not have a partnership with Microsoft, which is a sore point for us. We have reached out to Microsoft South Africa, and they are very hard to contact and largely uncooperative. We are a B-Level 2 and a B-Level 1, which are local affirmative action ratings that companies get. Level 1 is the highest, and Level 8 is the lowest. We hold amongst the highest BEE ratings, but we have not found Microsoft South Africa to be forthcoming or very open. We should have a partnership with them, and we run Power BI as we are a Power BI shop now. I strongly would want to see a box within Office 365 for our team to have ChatGPT through OpenAI as well. We use Excel as a data source for many tasks and find that it integrates really well with Python. We write a lot of Python code and use Excel as a data sheet many times, and we operate through SQL and other zero elements as well. From an Office 365 viewpoint, we find that with Copilot and Python and Excel's provision for Python, it is very useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Many people enjoy its zero learning-curve.​"
"What I like the most is the Wiki software that comes with Atlassian Confluence."
"The macros feature in Confluence is quite valuable."
"The best feature is document management."
"It is stable and reliable."
"Confluence can link any ticket or task from JIRA to be included on the Confluence page."
"The most beneficial aspect is real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on the same documents simultaneously."
"Copying another page and providing an option to edit everything is valuable."
"Many of the features in Office 365 are good, but I think Excel is a very good tool."
"The integration with other applications is pretty good."
"The functionality that is most valuable is the solution's ability to detect patient data in email attachments. Whenever a user sends out an email with patient data embedded in an attachment, it triggers an alert. The tool can detect a social security number and various other forms of patient identity. Emails are then automatically generated and sent."
"The technical support is outstanding."
"There are no more server and hardware operational costs and downtime, updates, etc. for all the workloads available. Newer features and updates are available immediately. Can be managed from a single web interface. Cloud-based, so same experience for all users, regardless of location."
"The most innovative feature of Office 365 is the Power Apps, which allows us to automate literally everything that we want automated. For example, sending attachments to specific folders on SharePoint, adding people's SharePoint when certain apps are performed, or emailing certain people at certain instances, such as when you've done a follow-up with the CRM and you need a marketing email to be sent out at a particular point."
"My primary use case is for preparing presentations to teach, often on PowerPoint."
"Quarantine email alerts to users to allow the email to their inbox (tricky but handy) - tricky if one doesn't have third-party email security, handy if one has got good third party email security)."
 

Cons

"When we have a project that we don't want to share with everybody but want people to know that it exists, there is no way to do this in Confluence. When a project is not shared, people cannot see that it exits."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve the stability, there are timeouts sometimes."
"The search function is not great."
"It would be good if they can continue working towards making documentation and editing as quick and easy as possible. It has got a lot of capability, but I don't know how to use it. I don't find some of the things that intuitive. Sometimes, it doesn't seem obvious to me how to use it, but it is like learning any new tool. You actually need to get trained on the tool to get maximum out of it."
"The solution is not very user-friendly."
"This is kind of by design, however, the lack of control in terms of editing the page to make it look the way you want it to look is an issue. It would be nice if there was more flexibility there."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"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."
"The one big problem with the solution is if you are presenting in Teams and someone puts their hand up, you don't get a notification. If you are running a meeting and just presenting you don't know that people have their hands up and want to ask a question."
"I rate the support of Office 365 a four out of five."
"There are some complexities to the initial setup if you use some of the more advanced features."
"Using Visual Basic, I have had a lot of trouble with relative paths when programming for Excel, and sometimes it is very difficult to debug programs."
"In terms of improvement, it should have tutorials when you first have the opportunity to use it, to be able to really learn it."
"Integration with other platforms can be improved."
"Sometimes the synchronization between the desktop and online is a little bit slow."
"We have found that, with Teams, if you are including one more person who is not in the company ecosystem, supposedly I'm inviting them as a guest in the chat. However, when I do that, I can't share files."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons."
"Pricing wise, it ends up being an expensive solution. In the beginning it's cheap, but by the time you have all the functions you need, it turns out to be expensive."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, meaning its price falls somewhere in the mid-range zone."
"Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything."
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"There is an annual license."
"We pay $350 a month to use the solution."
"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."
"The pricing is good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business."
"The pricing is high and has actually caused us to limit the number of licenses we purchase due to budgeting."
"For the moment, we are paying on a monthly basis because we are still adapting the support and how we want to proceed. I think we will move to paying for the annual license."
"Licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis, or we prepay them."
"I would rate the solution 3 out of 5 for the price. I think Microsoft presents a good solution concerning the price."
"Good reporting and good value subscriptions for international calls."
"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."
"We have a license to use this solution. We have an E3 license which covers many different solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
68%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Educational Organization
75%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Government
2%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?
I am not aware of the cost at work, but the cost for personal use has increased significantly and feels expensive.
What needs improvement with Office 365?
Moving from the original Outlook to Outlook 365 was problematic because I couldn't transfer a lot of my previous emails. This is an area where improvement is needed to make the transition smoother....
What is your primary use case for Office 365?
I use Office 365 ( /products/office-365-reviews ) strictly for sales. As a small office, we utilize products like Outlook and Word.
 

Also Known As

Confluence
Microsoft Office 365, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 F1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Me & the Bees Lemonade
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian Confluence vs. Office 365 and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.