Atlassian Confluence Reviews

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.

• 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.

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.

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 use Confluence for project documentation alongside Jira which we use for all our task assignments.

We have been using Jira for six months and have not yet used it to its full potential as we do not have qualified scrum masters in our team. We are able to assign tickets, make a scrum board and a sprint system. 

We have thousands of users who work with this solution. 

When you are creating a table in Confluence, there is no tool to export it into Excel sheet for quick references. We can only export it as an a PDF file, but not into an editable file.

If you new user wants to have access to data and do some analysis on the data, they need to convert it to PDF and then extract the tables. We would like to have an export button that could move the data to an editable format. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We have not yet contacted the customer support team for this solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

The implementation was completed by a third party. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

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.

We are using Atlassian Confluence as a repository for files.

The most valuable feature of Atlassian Confluence is the ability to access your files from anywhere.

Atlassian Confluence should improve the interface, it needs to be more user-friendly. It is easy to use, but it could be more intuitive.

I have been using Atlassian Confluence for six months.

Atlassian Confluence is stable.

I have found Atlassian Confluence to be scalable.

We had approximately 25 people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from Atlassian Confluence.

Atlassian Confluence was relatively simple to set up. The time it took was only a few minutes.

My advice to others before using this solution is to look at some tutorials or do a quick workshop to understand how the platform works. They can use a Google search and YouTube to find information.

I rate Atlassian Confluence a six out of ten.