Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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.

• Easy import and creation of new documents
• Notifications of the updated content
• Version history changes
• Cross team changing

Before using Confluence we have had the documentation spread across multiple shared drives and emails. Confluence gave us a chance to re-arrange the documents into a single repository and group the information logically in home page(s). I have called our home page a one-stop-shop for all team related links. Furthermore, other teams have created their own home pages and we are able to access each other spaces, sharing knowledge and know-how. When we do project work we can share the progress and develop documentation on the go while everyone has access to the latest version in real time. Talking about this, the thing I love about Confluence is that every document becomes a living document and we don't need to wait until it is 100% ready, but start with a draft and develop in progress.

Surprisingly enough the text editor is very limited in its functionality and given the fact that so many forum platforms and web sites have mastered this tool I believe Atlassian have no excuse to keep it this way. It lacks basics such as text highlighting, and adjusting the text size and working with tables is a nightmare. Text formatting and working with numbers and bullet points is time consuming. I would like to see more plugins and additional functionality such as embedding of other pages, drop down menus, insert buttons, and page templates.

I have used it for over two years.

No issues faced with deployment.

The software has been running as expected. We have faced an issue where the hard disk ran out of space and the application continued working, putting all the changes in the memory. We have identified this fact after a server restart and as a result the changes made in the last few weeks were lost (the current RAM setups are huge enough to store plenty of text based information). I believe a simple space utilisations could be implemented in the app to warn or stop it from working if there is no space. In my opinion, the impact of losing the work is bigger than having the app down until fixed.

As above plus the available users are based on license.

Customer Service:

I find the customer sevice limited.

Technical Support:

Technically speaking they have just enough resources to confirm bugs and lack of functionality but no people to follow on fixing and improving.

First of its kind in this environment.

Straightforward install and setup.

Implemented in-house. Quick and painless.

Confluence has saved time in finding information, reduced the on-boarding time, improved provisioning of repeatable scripted operational process, provided a central point for knowledge sharing and supplied better retention of Intellectual Property.

Not sure about the initial cost but the application itself needs little computing and some disk space.

Go fast, cheap and dirty when creating new documents and improve in progress - this tool concentrates on the sharing, arranging and collaboration part but doesn't aim too high about how the content looks like. If you are after some serious functionality such as a table of contents, body styles and track changes I would recommend using Word and attach as a doc file. Index your content in home pages and sub-home pages for better logical arrangement of the information and fast navigation. Research additional modules like Confluence Questions. You can use the spaces for team building management like having a section for photos from events, out of work activities or sharing industry related links.

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.

Still implementing.

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.

• Document management
• Knowledge base
• Team collaboration
• Security
• User management
• Integration with different tools

• Avoids the need for document versioning
• Centralizes document access
• Provides easy access
• Has an easy search facility
• Allows you to store all documents in one place
• Enables you to share documents
• Allows you to publish articles

• Bulk editing of documents
• Reports
• Content sharing
• Document publishing

I have used it for over three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter many scalability issues.

I would give them a rating of 7/10. The technical support was helpful.

The initial setup was fine. More memory may be required, depending upon the size of the attachments.

Pricing is provided on the Atlassian site. You can choose the license depending upon the number of users.

We evaluated SharePoint, XWiki, and MediaWiki.

Confluence is very easy to use and has strong search functionality.

The flexibility and scalability of Confluence.

The structure of spaces, pages and child pages allows an easy way to structure content in a way which suits our business.

Confluence has been our central knowledge platform for several years. All of our agent team use the knowledge base constantly throughout their work.

It takes some thought into how to structure confluence in a way which is intuitive for the team to use.

Search only takes you to a page, not an area of a page.

3 years

We had no issues with deployment.

We had no issues with stability.

Just in respects of how we structure our content. Confluence is perfectly scalable.

Customer Service:

Responsive and to the point. Also extensive knowledge base which is useful for most queries.

Technical Support:

10/10

We implemented in house with (at the time) limited technical expertise.

Hosting yourself allows greater flexibility in terms of extensions and customisation.

Overall, I love the ability to quickly upload and preview documents. The navigation is quite easy and intuitive once you grasp the file hierarchy. I use the template pages often to produce clean consistent spaces for clients.

It allows collaborative functionality across documents, meeting notes and project requirements.

I think the user interface could be more graphically pleasing, as well as establishing permissions across various spaces and user levels a bit clearer.

I have used this for approximately four years.

We have not had stability issues.

We didn’t have scaling issues once our company established its best use of the system and scaled from there.

We have not had to use them.

I used Basecamp previously. However, Confluence just fit our workflows better and at a better price.

Setup was very easy once the we established our goals in using the system.

Nothing more than the time spent previously using Basecamp.

Understand the permissions. We provide a login for clients with access to certain areas. With multiple clients ensuring data security, this was huge for us.

It's relatively easy to use, and has a lot of functionality with regard to formatting wiki articles and embedding content.

The search is pretty terrible. You can search for something that is quite close to text that appears in an article, and nothing will come up. I consistently have a hard time finding the things I care about on our wiki.

Overall it's a fine tool, but I don't think it provides a whole lot of advantages over other similar options. We use it primarily because we also use JIRA, and working with one vendor makes things easier.