Atlassian Confluence Reviews

• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Smooth integration with JIRA

This is our corporate wiki, all departments use it for process and knowledge management. We implemented a 'control center' in Confluence using the JIRA integration for both Change Control and Incident Management.

Reporting on content usage info and patterns is completely missing and would be a great addition. On-demand is especially limited due to the significantly reduced number of plug ins available. Reassignment of content ownership would also be a nice feature.

I've used it for three years.

It's an on-demand service.

There's been a few outages, but nothing significant.

It's an on-demand service.

It's not needed often, but they are responsive when issues are reported.

It's not needed often, and when they are, there's a good integration of reported issues to the backlog.

At a previous job we were beginning to use SharePoint, I am not an expert.

Confluence setup is very straightforward, but an absence of formal training availability caused it to take longer than it should have to become productive.

It was done in-house.

I don't have a specific number for it, but I consider it to be extensive, given the low cost and widespread use of this tool.

We are using the on-demand version and our pricing is fixed.

I would recommend you consider a managed hosting arrangement instead of on-demand, because of the limitations. I would also recommend a clear plan be developed for content structure and ownership.

We are able to add 3^rd party plugins and overall collaborative abilities. Keep in mind that DocOps moves the technical content industry from heavy duty doc apps to a crowdsourced approach which requires extensive collaboration. The plugins enabled basic doc properties such as version control from K15t.

DocOps is a leading edge approach to technical content. We could not have done this without Confluence. Other companies are looking to duplicate.

The search ability (using Lucene) is less than optimal and has known bugs that are slow in getting addressed. Search is key on any content platform.

We have had Confluence used casually inside R&D for several years, but then built DocOps using confluence at its core about 18 months ago. This rating is based on that instance (which is hosted at Contegix).

We use the latest release of Confluence.

No issues with deployment.

Yes, but because we stressed it with an integration to Lingotek which enables real-time cloud translation and a few plugins.

We are constantly watching scalability and are a bit worried but believe the costs of the new Data Center version cost prohibitive.

They seem to struggle a bit. We were having some concerns with CPU usage and heap memory. Support seemed to struggle with solving. I also felt like I really had to purchase support for $35k to get the level I really needed.

They seem to struggle a bit. We were having some concerns with CPU usage and heap memory. Support seemed to struggle with solving. I also felt like I really had to purchase support for $35k to get the level I really needed.

No. This was a different direction from a documentation systems to confluence. Not a switch of wiki products.

We had help from hired services help such as K16T and others. I also think our installation was much more complex than most from what I am told.

This is a complex answer given we created an industry leading platform and way of using confluence unlike any other user.

Due to our experience using it internally and based on a review of a few free wiki’s, we decided to go with Confluence so as to have only 1 product at CA.

Spend time figuring out the best way to maintain. Hosted vs On Premise. Also, you may need to develop new skills to install and manage the plugins.

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.

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.

I've been working with Confluence for eight years. It was initially on-premises, but we moved to the cloud four years ago.

It's stable, and we haven't had any issues at all.

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have about 300 users.

Some technical support staff are very helpful, but some just send documentation that is not very helpful. I would say that technical support needs improvement.

I didn't do the initial setup, but I think it's pretty easy. When I had to configure a new site, it was very easy.

SharePoint is very confusing, but Atlassian Confluence is very simple. After a couple of days, most people understand how it works, and it's quite simple.

I recommend Confluence to any company that wants to share information inside the company. Confluence is great; it's like a wiki. I would give it an eight out of ten.

We use Confluence to share weekly project information. Everyone in the company uses it daily from project managers down. 

It's easy to search for information.

I'd like to see some improved reporting on usage. 

We have been using Confluence for more than five years.

Confluence is stable. 

Confluence is scalable. Our company has 1,000 employees, and we're growing. It has kept pace with our growth. 

I rate Confluence eight out of 10. I won't rate it nine because my company didn't develop it. If my company had developed it, it would be much better. 

We are a remote company at this point. We use it to collaborate on different initiatives within our interior and marketing teams. It's kind of our one-stop-shop to house our collateral and sales information. It covers pretty much anything and everything we need and everything our marketing teams would need as well.

We really like how it organizes everything. I don't know if it's because of the ability to create different pages or not, however, everything is very organized. It's easy to differentiate different materials based on the project and navigate to them. The solution makes it so it's very easy to navigate and very easy to search. 

It's extremely intuitive.

The solution is great for non-technical users. You don't have to have a big technological background to work with it effectively. I myself am not very technical and I can get around it without much difficulty.

The UI is good but bland. It could be updated a bit to make it more modern and interesting to look at.

I've only been using the solution since January of 2020, so it's been about six months now.

The stability of the solution is great. There are no issues whatsoever there. I haven't found that it crashes or freezes. There aren't bugs or glitches that affect the way it functions. I would say that it is very consistent and reliable.

I assume the scalability of the solution is good. My company has used it for several years now. We've been growing in that time and we haven't had any kind of stability issues and we've never felt like the solution has gotten too small to meet our needs. It grows with us. We've been able to utilize it as we've needed, as we've grown. It seems to scale nicely.

I've never had a need to reach out to technical support, so I can't speak to the quality of its services.

We also use Salesforce as a project management tool. They aren't really the same, however, we do use the two in tandem.

I don't know what the licensing costs for the solution are at this time.

We're Atlassian customers. I'm just the customer success manager, so I'm not on the technical or the testing side.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are on, however, I believe it to be the most up to date version that is currently available.

I'd advise other organizations, if they decide to implement the solution, to really utilize it. If you plan to use it as a really strong collaborative tool, ensure that everyone using it has access to the required documents and that they utilize it on a consistent basis. I've found the most benefits from using it when I'm consistent with it. You really need to update it as often as you update your Salesforce. That might mean daily updating, depending on how you use it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had better UI, I might rate it a bit higher.

• Search: It is simple to search for documentation throughout Confluence from the search bar.
• Audit History: Collaboration is brilliant with a full audit history on the changes made by the users involved, as well as the ability to visually compare the differences.
• Simple Navigation: It is simple to create or edit a page with a similar look and feel to any word processor-type app.
• Templates: Used for standardizing and guiding users regarding what type of information should be captured within different spaces or page structures.
• Action Items: Makes it quick to set reminders for yourself or another user, with a due date for the required activity.

• It has improved collaboration, transparency, and documentation quality among teams.
• It has started us on the journey of knowledge management, not leaving valuable IP in peoples’ heads.
• It has enabled us to publish ubiquitous language and link standard definitions to words used in documents.
• It has enabled us to link templates to JIRA workflows in the management of our business processes.
• It has drastically improved the discipline around meetings and arising actions.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• When comparing page changes, you are only able to select 2 pages. While this is useful, it has proven to be a slight limitation when many people are editing a document. Having said this, we work around it by selecting the last “approved version” and the latest version. The downside is that we are unable to then see who made the change and when they made it without going to that specific history version are comparing it to the version just prior to it.
• Page approval: there is a feature whereby you are able to require page approval, but it can only be applied at a space level (with the ability to apply certain exclusions). The exclusion capability is not intuitive and therefore does not always work as expected. In addition, there is usually a specific parent and child set within a space that we would want to set approval requirements on. The approval plugin also keeps adding “Unapproved” blocks to the top of the page whenever an edit occurs. These continue to build up despite the fact that there has not been a status change (i.e. the page has not yet been approved, so one “Unapproved” block would be sufficient).

I have used Confluence for approximately three years.

We had an issue where the activity feed stopped working due to a locked cache file. This has not repeated itself.

We currently have approximately 200 users and have not experienced any difference in performance from when we had 10 users.

We haven’t used technical support.

Our previous solution was a combination of our file system, local hard drives, and an internally developed document management system.

We implemented Confluence because we needed a place to collaborate around software design and design specifications that was integrated with JIRA.

• Setup was fairly straightforward
• Some configuration is required to integrate with LDAP for authentication, if that is your chosen route
• Some configuration is required if you integrate with other Atlassian products
• The installation guide covers everything

Make use of the evaluation option if you are unsure. Another option is to start small and test whether Confluence is for you.

A 10-user license is only $10. Be aware of the costs if you plan on rolling it out to your organization, as it does start to add up.

Try to do license changes on your anniversary month, as there is no pro-rata benefit.

We didn’t evaluate alternatives. The implementation was driven by our Java development team and their requirement for a place to collaborate and plan development work.

Employ lean thinking and learn by doing! Have a rough idea of what you need to achieve and get a working framework in place. Experiment and see what works for you. It is simple to move pages after the fact, so don’t worry about being too pedantic in the beginning. Keep permissions simple and use groups as much as possible.

Built in revision history and document management makes this ideal for companies without a dedicated document controller, and makes life significantly easier for document controllers who are using paper-based systems.

I've used Confluence as a Quality Management System at several companies; traditional QMS’s need pretty dedicated management by a document controller to make sure revision history is maintained, changes go through an adequate approval process, and only the latest approved versions of documents are being used. Confluence essentially handles all of that, which means companies without the means for a dedicated document controller can still implement a QMS, and/or companies with a document controller benefit from the added efficiencies.

Really speeds up creation and approval of policies and procedures and provides a centralized area for users to access current versions of documents.

Sometimes has issues with cron jobs crashing - need to check more recent versions to see if this has been resolved.

I'd also love to see integrated project management with Gantt charts, but I'm a sucker for Gantt charts.

We use the solution for all kinds of documentation that are part of the testing, product, and development phases and for taking meeting notes. 

Atlassian Confluence has definitely improved our organization. Before Confluence, we only had documentation on JIRA. Now, the requirements are routinely documented. We use the solution for test planning and documentation-related testing. It is also extremely useful for technical documentation. You can create different spaces for the different teams. Atlassian Confluence has helped the company a lot.

We have found limiting permissions and history very valuable. History tracking is good, and so is commenting and tagging somebody when commenting. Other valuable features include linking Confluence and JIRA and having a Confluence cloud on Slack. The roadmap feature in Confluence is very good.

The comparing history versions feature could be improved. It's messy and not useful. I remember that it was much better initially. 

The roadmap feature should be made easier to work with and modify. It's not really scalable. Confluence is hard to work with as well. Specifically, you cannot set the dates or choose shorter periods of time, like one day or two days. It looks a bit messy. I kept getting questions about it, so I added a note advising people not to pay too much attention to the inaccurate dates.

We've been using this solution for more than two years.

The product has really great performance. There are no issues with that at all.

The team more than doubled in the last couple of years, and we didn't have any issues with scalability. It was very smooth.

I never had any problems, so I never had any experience with customer service and support, and I don't believe anybody did, or they would've shared it on the channel. 

We previously used JIRA, but it didn't work because the tickets became old, and it wasn't easy to tag where the documentation was. So that's why we switched to Confluence.

There were no other options on the table before we went for Confluence because I wasn't on the committee that selected it. But using JIRA as an adapting product probably made the team choose Confluence faster. And some of the team had used it before. I had used a very simple version around five years before. So I had some experience with it. Of course, in five years, the tool had changed a lot.

Our ROI is more like something that helps us save money and share knowledge when onboarding new people or introducing existing employees to new processes, products and services and planning, but it doesn't really generate revenue. You could say that our ROI from this product is a monetary and quality-of-life improvement.

I would rate Confluence eight on a scale of one to 10.

I'm not sure whether all our applications are available on the same cloud. But one of the clouds we use is AWS. And since the product is on the cloud, we don't usually have any issues. You don't need to maintain it or make backups because you can contact the cloud provider and ask for whatever backup you need if anything is lost.

I never encountered any problem with the solution that required help from support. So I never reported any issue to management, and I don't believe anybody else did, or it would've been shared on the channel. 

It took us some time to benefit from Confluence because we had to create a documentation process, which meant adopting a document mindset to get into the habit of documenting, which was a real challenge. At first, we allocated around two hours a day for documenting, which didn't work. But as the QA team grew, we started documenting their processes, which greatly benefited us. We don't benefit much from the dev documentation, but the product and the QA team do. Though it took us a while to get into that state.

I would say we use about 60 percent of the product's features 

We currently have more than 30 people using Confluence in our company.

My advice to anyone thinking about using or implementing Confluence is to start small and use it more and more as you get used to it. Start using it as part of your process. It's very important not to dedicate all your resources to it. Start bit by bit, and you'll benefit from it the most. That's how your employees get used to it. Start incorporating it into their processes, but don't enforce it, or it won't work properly. Like everything in life, you have to start small, and as you get used to it, you'll know exactly what you want from it and the best way to get it.

Pioneering team members should start using Confluence, showcasing how it benefits the company. They should encourage colleagues and peers to use it. First users should also add articles and documentation so others can use the tool more easily. Without this encouragement, team members will completely ignore the tool, and it will be put down as lost expenses that didn't benefit the company.