Atlassian Confluence Reviews

Editing is convenient. We often have to edit manuals for different projects of the same software. These projects have only small differences in features.

In the past, only documentation engineers could edit the software manuals. Now, both developers and documentation engineers can edit manuals and share opinions.

It is not as professional as FrameMaker. Confluence is light and very convenient, but it is difficult to reuse the same content and its format is not as flexible as FrameMaker.

We have been using the solution for three years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability but we have not been using it as often as FrameMaker.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We seldom used the technical support.

The setup is more complex and the developers helped to set up the environment.

Confluence is convenient and cheaper but not so professional. FrameMaker is for documentation departments in a large company and Confluence is for small teams or companies.

Ask the vendor to set up your environment if you buy Confluence.

Content creation and sharing, collaboration

Reduced redundant communication and overall better communication among knowledge workers

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

6 years

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.

Haven't had any issues with stability.

Haven't had any issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

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

Straightforward

In-house

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

Yes - all wiki and collaboration platforms available

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:

We have got our own private Confluence set up. In our department, we use Jira and Confluence a lot. These are our in-house go-to tools for managing the agile ways of working. We sort of follow a bit of both models: traditional and agile. We follow the traditional waterfall model outside of Confluence and Jira, so that's more like requirements, specifications, and documents. There's another team, with which I haven't been that involved, that writes user stories and allocates tasks in Jira. They use it quite heavily.

We use Jira more for agile type processing, like for Kanban boards and all that sort of stuff and allocating work tasks and two-week sprints. It supports the actual agile process. Jira is much more focused on the process of delivery.

It is just the fact that it is a one-stop shop for all project documentation. It is compared to storing things in files and directories and stuff like that. It provides the overall usability and accessibility of many projects and documents in one area. 

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.

I have been using this solution for the last two to three years.

It is scalable.

We have our own engineers.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I would rate Atlassian Confluence an eight out of ten. It provides everything for our use cases.

It is easy and simple to implement. Some of the valuable features are its ability to customize via add-ons and the collaborative environment.

For many of my clients, we use Confluence as a shared collaborative knowledge management tool. It helps them as it is one repository for all the information and is easily searchable .

Rich text could always be better but it is nice to have.

I have used this product for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues, i.e., if you have enough IT resources.

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating.

My customers were previously using a different solution. The reason they switched is because Confluence is a simple wiki-based solution, compared to the other wiki tools.

The setup was straightforward.

You should do it. It is so simple and can give so much added value rapidly.

The valuable features are:

• It is easy to use.
• It is easy for newcomers to start using it.
• It has the “what you see is what you get” functionality of MS Word.
• It is easy to move pages around. There is no excuse for not doing documentation just because you do not know where to add it.
• It has good integration with JIRA. You can really do great things with the two products.

The license part is too flexible.

We have been using this solution since 2008.

There have not been any stability issues.

There have not been many scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 9 out of 10.

We used SharePoint a long time ago, and we will never go back to it.

The installation can be quite complex. You need to know what you are doing in order to install it on your own. The cloud version is very easy to install.

You need to buy a full license for your entire organization, even though you only need a plugin for two people.

There needs to be an owner of the installation, in terms of the system and the infrastructure.

Configurability, modern web application, and the large community.

Thorough tracking and logging of actions (Nothing gets lost), far fewer office files sent around by collaborating online, instant availability of information.

• A lot of bugs already reported to Atlassian are not addressed.
• Avatars must be square.
• Status lozenges must offer more than three colors.

5 years.

No issues with deployment.

Yes. Both applications do not recover from loss of database server connection. Even if DB server is back online, applications need a restart.

Up to now it performs ok. We are at 300,000 issues. Getting the impression that it will get tight now.

Customer Service:

As an Enterprise Customer the service is not sufficient. Our concerns are not being addressed. Active visits at our site would be appreciated to explain our issues.

Technical Support:

Did not need it yet.

We switched because it was the better product for a lesser price.

Initial setup was straightforward.

In-house team.

At the time it was $8000 one off and $4000 yearly maintenance. Atlassian forced to switch to Enterprise licenses which doubled the cost.

Mantis.

Be prepared that functionality of today might be changed or removed or charged separately without being asked. Bugs can be reported but are often not addressed for years. Atlassian may make major design decisions not considering their customers needs and requirements.

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.

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.

Categories, document editing and creation, the great permission system, awesome plugin management.

Confluence allows creating new documentation very fast. This allowed us to organize our self-written documentation in a very efficient way.

There are two things which annoy us the most:

(a) It is written in Java and therefore comes with all the overhead and issues of Java applications.

(b) It doesn't allow editing documents with multiple users at the same time.

I have been using it for almost two years.

Deployment can be painful when you have to deal with different Java versions or keystores. The rest is very simple since there is a very good install and upgrade wizard.

No, Confluence turned out to be very stable.

No, not yet.

I didn't get in touch with Atlassian yet. But they have an awesome wiki and Q&A section.

I was using several open source wiki systems, all of them lacked the great ACL and plugin system of Confluence.

It was straight forward.

I implemented it myself.

The more users you have, the more money you will spend. Make sure to give only those users access who really need it.

Make sure to run backups by dumping the database and saving the Confluence home on nightly basis.