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Atlassian Confluence vs Drupal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Atlassian Confluence
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Social Software (2nd), Knowledge Management Software (1st)
Drupal
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of Atlassian Confluence is 16.1%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 15.0%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
 

Featured Reviews

RabindraMaharana - PeerSpot reviewer
Editing features improve document accessibility
There is a holiday calendar, however, I need to install an app or add something to it. The add-on feature is not readily available or well-documented. Guidance on this should be available in a forum. Recently, I used a feature in another tool—perhaps GitHub—where it helped prepare a chart. It involved listing resources, like having fifteen people in the X team, ten in the Y team, and seven in the Z team. It created a bar chart showing these numbers. This chart used AI to offer users the option to create it based on the data. It was then created on a separate page and made available.
it_user628050 - PeerSpot reviewer
The best features are its extensibility and plug-ability. It has a very good authentication/authorization system.
The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework. This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge. Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily. With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts. The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We value the way we can tag documentation to Jira because we can cross-reference a Jira ticket to a Confluence page, and we can also add a Confluence page to a Jira ticket."
"This solution allowed us to easily input details beyond just text, such as creating basic data charts to monitor team performance."
"We have found limiting permissions and history very valuable."
"The product has a valuable feature for quick verification of documents."
"The customization that Confluence offers is one of its most useful features. You can customise it based on the specific project you are working on. It also supports multiple languages."
"The most valuable feature is the accessibility from different sites for different colleagues and the search option."
"What's most valuable to me in Atlassian Confluence is that it allows the concurrent development of documentation. I also like how you can add comments offline and implement changes directly on the document."
"It's easy to use and you can create all types of pages."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."
"It is good for big projects."
"The feature I find most valuable is that Drupal is a framework and not only a CMS."
"You can build websites on it very quickly."
 

Cons

"There is no concept of peer review or a draft mode - whatever you write is live."
"The roadmap feature should be made easier to work with and modify. It's not really scalable."
"The dashboards should be improved."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve the stability, there are timeouts sometimes."
"I would like to see integration with Slack."
"I have a couple of different pipelines that I work with. However, I'd like to see them displayed differently on the same dashboard. So, I would like to have a unified dashboard to view the different pipelines."
"Confluence could incorporate stronger records management and automation features. The current management structure is too open, which becomes an issue."
"It would be good if they can continue working towards making documentation and editing as quick and easy as possible. It has got a lot of capability, but I don't know how to use it. I don't find some of the things that intuitive. Sometimes, it doesn't seem obvious to me how to use it, but it is like learning any new tool. You actually need to get trained on the tool to get maximum out of it."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
"The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"To my knowledge, Atlassian Confluence had a pricing approach which is a commercial open-source solution, so that if you are a company, you had to pay an amount. This fee was not huge compared to other traditional solutions, and it was free for personal use or if you were an individual."
"Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything."
"Making integration with other tools easier would be beneficial."
"The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive."
"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."
"We have to pay licensing fees."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, meaning its price falls somewhere in the mid-range zone."
"The issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons."
"I would like to see better pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
74%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Government
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Atlassian Confluence?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from its document-controlling feature. In Atlassian Confluence, controlled documents cannot be edited by anyone else.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian Confluence?
With Atlassian, the costs are reasonable. Although higher than before when we used multiple platforms and licenses, having a collaborative platform like this is advantageous. It streamlines license...
What needs improvement with Atlassian Confluence?
There is a holiday calendar, however, I need to install an app or add something to it. The add-on feature is not readily available or well-documented. Guidance on this should be available in a foru...
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Also Known As

Confluence
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian Confluence vs. Drupal and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.