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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

"This is a scalable solution that supports thousands of users."
"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."
"Copying another page and providing an option to edit everything is valuable."
"What I find the most valuable about Confluence is how easy it is to use."
"It is stable and reliable."
"The scalability is enough for our use cases. It covers all our needs."
"The solution offers a lot of freedom when drafting directly online."
"Great shareable and co-editing features."
"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."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the text editor upgraded from its current limited abilities."
"Atlassian Confluence's old versions consume too much memory, making it an area where optimization is required from an improvement perspective."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve how information is shared outside our company. We had some negative experiences with the rights we have with our information when sharing it within Atlassian Confluence and with other teams outside the company. It's due to the limitations on the rights we have on the export capabilities. We don't have sufficient rights to do so."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve the stability, there are timeouts sometimes."
"I would like Confluence to include the ability to draw flowcharts and diagrams."
"There are some issues with performance when creating tables."
"Some elements of the user interface could be more user-friendly, including embedding diagrams."
"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."
"The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
"It is a little bit simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing wise, it ends up being an expensive solution. In the beginning it's cheap, but by the time you have all the functions you need, it turns out to be expensive."
"Making integration with other tools easier would be beneficial."
"There is a license needed to use Atlassian Confluence."
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive."
"When you purchase this solution you get some support."
"There is an annual license."
"We have a site license for Atlassian Confluence and there are some limitations on external users."
"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
No data available
 

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.