Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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 this solution to manage the knowledge base within our organization. We're looking to use Confluence for collaboration and data, sharing information internally and externally. Confluence is connected to our JIRA, so we also use it for task management. And vice versa, JIRA can link to the Confluence page. We are customers of Confluence and I'm a data manager.

It's great for us that this is a free format. It's easy to share information with other people and the integration with JIRA is good. The product is getting better all the time with a new template and new functionalities. This is a robust, agile, and reliable tool for collaborating. 

The search function is not great. That's one area where we feel that Confluence is lacking. The second issue is that an additional license is required when you are sharing data externally. There are a couple of instances where we've had integration issues with other apps and that needs to be improved. I'd like to see more of a workflow process. For example, an approval process, where you get through one layer and then go to the next layer, like the process that SharePoint has. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The product is becoming more stable and reliable these days, I think. A couple of versions ago we had some issues when a lot of users were updating to the same page or sharing documents. It's much more reliable now and we haven't had any problems in the past six months. 

Our company is not that big so we haven't needed to scale. 

We deployed in-house. 

Licensing is not very expensive. The issue is that engagement with an external party or stakeholder requires the purchase of an additional license. It's the same issue if we have a consultant coming on board and is a pain point for us.

It's important to understand your needs in terms of the number of processes and number of people you need to support in your organizational structure. Implementing up front will likely help in terms of knowing in advance that the product will be supported. Otherwise, there might be a situation where the configuration will need to be changed after the initial setup. Confluence was initially somewhat complex for us. There were a lot of things we needed to consider and configure. Over time as we grow and evolve as a business we're getting more of an understanding of how the solution works and it's getting easier. There's a learning curve.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

Every project and every initiative we start gets a Confluence site to track artifacts that are created related to that initiative. For example, we will use it for a knowledge base and for general documentation. We collect all of our meeting minutes, action lists, and so on. It is grouped in scenarios for reference, et cetera.  

I think it is easy to use. There are a large number of out-of-the-box templates, which can satisfy the majority of use cases. If those templates do not quite cover what you want them to do, you can tweak the templates so you can create your own just so you end up with standardized content look and feel. It integrates well with the other Atlassian products, like the Jira software, which we use for our software development teams.  

Overall I am pretty satisfied with it. We like the user interface and it is similar to the Jira software as well which makes it very familiar.  

Workflows is an area where it could be improved. Out-of-the-box, it does not have a good workflow solution, which is a bit odd given that there is a good workforce solution in Jira software. We had to purchase a workflow management tool off the marketplace called Kamala and that probably should not have been necessary. So, they could probably do with a bit of development on the workflows front to include a better solution out-of-the-box, but other than that, not a lot needs to be improved.  

Personally, I have been using Confluence since around 2013. About seven years.  

Confluence does not have any bugs, glitches that I can recall.  

The scalability is pretty good.  

The installation and setup for Confluence itself is relatively straightforward. There is good online documentation for it as well. The templates help make easy work of the design and site creation.  

I would recommend Confluence, especially for anyone that is using other Atlassian products. It is a simple, additional, license to get the solution and it integrates really well with the other products in the Atlassian family.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Confluence overall as a product as an eight-out-of-ten. I would not rate it higher because like all the Atlassian products, there are certain things I think the product should have out-of-the-box without you needing to go to the marketplace. For example, it does not have an approvals type of workflow. If you want to create content and have other people review and approve it before it gets published that should be available. I would think that is something that it should have out-of-the-box.  

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.

We use this solution for all activities related to the software development lifecycle. We use it starting from product spec and product definition documents and release notes to any customer discussion documents, design or architecture documents.

The ease of use has been one of the most valuable features. It has a very simple wiki. The other salient feature is the search capability and association with Jira, which comes integrated with it that makes it convenient to use.

The user interface is a little bit stale. The file attachments and how they work could be improved. There is also room for improvement when it comes to CDNs. 

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

This is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

This is a very scalable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have rarely needed any assistance from the support team. When we have needed support, they have been very helpful. 

Positive

The initial setup is very simple.

The Confluence pricing is good. The only challenge we have experienced is with Jira and the add ons we use that need to be paid for separately. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We document all the processes and flows we are planning to implement on projects. We capture all kinds of documentation. 

It's the best application to document all types of information. That's the best part. It's a good product, generally.

The solution is stable.

We can scale it. 

Technical support is helpful. 

On the cloud, we do not have a source editor if you want to go and validate the watch type of HTML or if you want to pull that HTML content for that cloud of pages. Atlassian needs to provide the source editor or a built-in plugin. 

I've been using the solution for more than six years. It's been a while. 

The solution is quite stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

600 people are using the solution currently.

While the solution is scalable, we had an issue with each user. For example, users are not able to log into their applications on the cloud. Only on the cloud do we face this issue.

Technical support has been helpful. We are very satisfied with the level of support they provide.

In terms of the initial setup, we were not able to do it right. Separately, we needed to build our own add-on.

I'm a customer and end-user.

While now we use the Atlassian cloud deployment, it used to be deployed on-premises. 

It's a simple application for documentation. New users just need to know how to create the permissions or the pages, the restrictions, or the macros. If they know, that's fine. They can use the Confluence application and they will find it very easy.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

There are two use cases for using Confluence wiki:

• Team notes
• Software documentation.

Wiki is a simple tool for developers to write and record team decisions explaining the product that they are creating. 

The best features are the following:

• Automated TOC
• Horizontal tabbing option
• Expanding drop down lists
• Easy image integration
• Access to the underlying HTML
• The list of macros in the drop down.

There is no concept of peer review or a draft mode - whatever you write is live. What typically happens is that the navigation bar becomes frighteningly large and difficult to read unless someone takes the reigns and curbs the knee jerk reaction to keep creating new branches in wiki's hierarchical tree.

No issues.

No issues.

Never tried to contact them. There is a lot of info on the web about Confluence wiki if you need help.

Wiki has been used for a long time at my company. Many people enjoy its zero learning-curve.

In-house.

Wiki is a good solution for non-tech writers. It is easy to learn and has a number of good features. The writing does not live beside the code, like GitHub Markdown does, nor does the wiki editor contain advanced editing features, like MindTouch, Oxygen, and other DITA editors. However, its simplicity encourages non-writers to document what they are doing.

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.