Atlassian Confluence Reviews

In multiple organizations, we have been using Atlassian Confluence as a knowledge base, and for development. Our developers use it alongside Jira.

What I like the most is the Wiki software that comes with Atlassian Confluence.

The interface is good and it's pretty easy to use. Most developers have some experience with Jira, which makes it pretty easy for people to pick up. We don't usually need to provide them a string.

They can easily take on some of the features from Slack. 

They could try and copy Slack more and bring them into the market a bit quicker. That would be helpful for them.

I would like to see integration with Slack.

There could be improvements with the app ecosystem. For example, if we look at Teams, there is now an entire ecosystem. With Teams, you can essentially install any apps and do any integrations. Third-party, similar to Microsoft.

It's more about integrations with third parties. That is also something that could be better.

I think it can be more competitive, considering the competition they are now going to get from Slack and Teams. For example, if you look at Microsoft Teams, Microsoft is providing 365 for free with Slack.

I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.

We have not had any issues.

We have 1100 users.

The customer support is pretty good. If you reach out to them, they are very helpful.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, I have never had any issues.

When you purchase this solution you get some support.

Jira and Confluence go hand in hand. If it's for development, and if people have money to pay for one product only, they usually end up purchasing Jira, and not Confluence. 

But at the end of the day, it's an ecosystem. It really depends on how much you want to integrate and how much you want to dive into it.

It really depends on what ecosystem they invest in and what they're looking for.

You have to look at the use case and if you already have an application in your ecosystem which is fit for purpose, you have to ask yourself, why you want to go out and pay for another product?

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The ease at which any employee can curate content and the ease in which people can discover meaningful and important information to get their job done.

We are hard core users so there are a lot of examples: At HomeAway we have product development teams for our sites, they use confluence both to document product roadmaps, and for the integration with JIRA to relay to stakeholders the updated status. It is the only place people go at HomeAway to get information.

The ability to delegate administrative roles, very difficult to give someone delegated administrative ability – almost all or nothing.

My company has been working with Atlassian for 6 years.

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

No. We were having issues but that was because we hadn’t configured properly.

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Formerly used Sharepoint – we like that Confluence has higher usability for the user so we can democratize content creation.

I was not here for the initial setup, but the upgrades setup is complex for us mainly because cloning the environment for testing is complex.

I would definitely not just purchase and install – engage with an expert, there is a lot of power in using Confluence and you need expert guidance to use it all properly.

This solution is for sharing records. We are customers of Confluence. 

Confluence has helped us by providing faster communication.

I like the shareable and co-editing features.

If there are multiple links on one page, the usage of RAM is extremely high. I'd like to see an improvement in the way they optimize the preview of the link because it feels like too much RAM is being used.

I've been using this solution for about a year. 

There are occasionally some glitches and the system crashes, but not too often.

The setup is fairly simple, it's just a website that you login to use. There's nothing to install. Just register an account and use it. 

We've saved time by using this product. 

I use this solution all the time for record keeping. I suggest to anyone using this solution to be creative. It's a platform so its use is really up to the user. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We were developing an eCommerce platform and wanted to capture all of the metrics that were coming across. We chose Confluent, which is a ready-to-use solution. The use case was to track all of the traffic that was coming from across the globe, and create metrics out of it.

We used the solution for monitoring and alerting. It was purely for internal processes so we could monitor the status of services and see if something was happening, like an order not getting through, or the customer dropping, or a problem within the system itself. The ability to capture those kind of metrics helped the business.

The solution does have tons of features, but sometimes we don't want every feature to be there, we just want a basic solution. They don't offer the option to customize the package, so you get everything with the one bundle price. Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything. There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model.

I used this solution for about a year as an integrator for a previous program.

Overall, we had a good experience with this solution. I'm pretty satisfied because we were able to quickly achieve what we wanted to do.

The scalability of the solution is pretty good. I would rate the scalability as a seven or eight out of nine. 

The solution has good support.

We used open source Kafka or other solutions where you can deploy the open source version in your infrastructure and you don't have to pay anything, but you have to manage the solution by yourself.

The initial setup was straightforward and quick. 

We used CodeFish for deployment. 

The pricing depends on traffic, like how much input and output is happening and how many messages you're handling. For example, you have a bundle package that has a limit. If you go beyond that, there's a different price attached to it, but if you are within that limit, it's a fixed price.

Overall, the solution helped us to see where we were going wrong and where we were doing good, and that helped us to make proper decisions.

Confluent is a very good product, but only if you are using it to the fullest. If you want to use all the features offered by Confluent, there's no competitor for that, but if you're only looking for basic capabilities, then I wouldn't suggest Confluent. MSK has less capability as compared to Confluent, but since we were not using all of the capabilities, MSK is cheaper for me because I just want the basic features.

Confluent is a classic product. There's no doubt that they're leading the market and their offerings are excellent. I would rate them as a nine out of ten.

The fact that Confluence is a wiki that allows near WYSIWYG editing. Having an “easy to use” product means that users have a “low threshold” to use it. This is very important, as the value of any information store is that of the data that is put in to it.

The ease of use makes it accessible for all users. Users are able to insert/edit information without having to have wiki knowledge. We can put any “static” information in Confluence. “Static” meaning that the information does not change on a daily basis. The strong search function let’s us find stored information rapidly.
We store customer information, work processes, to do’s, best practices, etc.

Some things like:

• Being able to (default) sort comments on pages with the last comment first.
• Being able to require “restricted access” permission to view Confluence pages (like JSD).
• The Atlassian cloud pricing model is pretty steep. Confluence should be accessible by a relatively large audience, but the pricing model prohibits this. For example, we like to grant our customers access.
• Inheritable permissions. This enables a “tree” of pages to share the same permissions. Currently, permissions can be set on a space, and altered per page. This is not very handy, as it is easy to forget setting permissions where it is needed or desired.

I have been using Confluence for five years.

We have not noticed any stability issues.

The pricing model is too steep for us to really use it for everything.

Technical support is generally very good. I must say though, that Atlassian’s success has made the company less flexible with respect to responding to users wishes and requirements. I have had several issues/demands that I found I was not alone in. On most occasions, there where one or more support issues in the Atlassian support portal and more and more, people complain about not being heard.

I have not used another solution before.

Having a cloud solution, setup is easy. Being somewhat of an expert from using Atlassian products for years, I know where to look. For novice users, I’ve been told that not everything is easy to find.

My advise to Atlassian is to offer a less steep model and also offer “read-only access” for non-paying users. We currently are looking for a second product to use in a situation where we need to offer access to 40-50 read-only customers.

I started using Confluence when we started with JIRA. Therefore, I did not evaluate other products.

Confluence Cloud is especially easy to get started with. With $10 a month for 10 users, it is pretty cheap. You have to keep in mind, however, that the pricing changes dramatically when the user count goes up. New users should think about what they may need later, when they start.

It is a collaboration tool. All of our company documentation is on Confluence.

I am using its latest version. It is a cloud solution. Atlassian is the cloud provider.

It is very useful for companies that want to deploy their documents in a private cloud repository. Companies don't need to store their documents on some servers on their premises. This document collaboration platform makes it flexible to reach your documents at any time. There is no time or location limitation. You can reach your documents whenever you want and wherever you want. For that reason, it is a very useful tool.

Collaboration is most valuable. You can upload or create your documents on Confluence and share them with your team members. Your team members also can share documents. 

Confluence can integrate with draw.io and some of the other third-party tools as well. For that reason, it is joyful to use.

It has good integrations, but its integration capabilities can be improved.

They can improve the table feature of Confluence. It is currently not adequate.

I have been using this solution for three months.

It is a stable solution.

It can be used by as many team members as you want to collaborate. It is no problem.

You don't need any technical support. It is easy to use.

It is just for document collaboration. There is no deployment period. You are just creating your documents on Confluence.

I am using the paid version. My company has purchased it for company employees. We are using Confluence as a company. I don't know how much it costs, but its price is good enough. Its price is not so high.

It is a collaboration tool for document development. You can create, improve, and share your documents through Confluence. It is quite an efficient tool to collaborate with your team members. I would strongly recommend it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

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.

The following features are valuable:

• The Wiki nature of the product: Collaborative creation of content with version history and easy change tracking.
• Knowledge sharing: Captures and provides visibility on decisions and conversations, enables early feedback, fosters situational awareness (watchers, notifications, comments, dashboard, etc.).
• Connects people through content and fosters a collaboration culture.
• Easy learning curve and powerful search through content.
• The cloud version accelerates the adoption of product improvements.

This has helped our organization in the following ways:

• Enables conversations and meeting outcomes to be visible and evolve faster.
• Opens collaboration and empowers everybody to contribute in knowledge construction.
• Accelerates the learning curve of new hires by giving them a platform for self-learning and understanding conversation dynamics.
• Helps groups do asynchronous work, reducing meetings overload, and improving productivity.
• Enables distributed teams to have a common virtual place for knowledge sharing and history.

I would like to see the solution do the following:

• Provide analytics on content usage to help foster adoption. Currently, the statistics have to be requested and are very basic in the cloud version.
• Help in the organization of the content (i.e., help identify "dead nodes", build different perspectives and categorization automatically with a type of page mapping and navigation other than a hierarchical tree.)
• Improve concurrent collaborative editing. (A relatively new feature has already been proven and is evolving in other products such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office Online.)
• Help in the consumption of updates according to personalized interest.

I have been using this solution since 2012 in different implementations, settings, and versions. I have been using it with the cloud version since 2015.

In the past maintenance windows could create some availability issues if overlapping with activity periods, but they have been consistently improving performance. You can experience slow response times, images not updated properly, sometimes unavailability messages. A status page is provided to monitor ondemand server ( http://bit.ly/ondemand-status ). Additionally setting the server time zone properly can also help avoid interference with your peak hours of activity ( http://bit.ly/ondemand-mainten... )

We have not had any scalability issues.

The technical support is very good.

I have used MediaWiki and SharePoint before.

In comparison with MediaWiki, Confluence is easy to use, more user-friendly, and is rich with social/collaboration features. It has a relatively low cost, and integrates better with other Atlassian tools such as JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.

In comparison with SharePoint, Confluence has a Wiki native design and social features, so it’s easy to collaborate on content creation. I like to compare it to a "whiteboard", whereas SharePoint feels more like a "library". Although SharePoint has improved a lot in the last few years, its pattern of use are still more like a "repository", rather than "collaborative editing".

Google Docs is the king of collaborative editing, but Confluence enables better structure for a team, with knowledge-centered design.

The installation was straightforward. It was easy to start, easy to setup with low administration involvement, as long as you have an "open by default" policy around content.

Complexity comes into play to drive evolution, content curation, usage, and adoption analytics. When you don’t have enough information on usage easily available, setting up some guidelines can help drive consistent patterns of usage. You need people to help guide that process and keep the organization of the content coherent.

Pricing and licensing are also straightforward. Keep an eye on plugins and additions that should be balanced with the benefits and usage patterns they provide.

We looked into MediaWiki, SharePoint, and Jive.

Think about your needs and goals. Test-drive it with a team of people in a real scenario.