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Atlassian Confluence vs IBM FileNet 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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (2nd), Knowledge Management Software (1st)
IBM FileNet
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Atlassian Confluence and IBM FileNet aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Atlassian Confluence is designed for Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) and holds a mindshare of 16.1%, down 19.4% compared to last year.
IBM FileNet, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Content Management, holds 10.4% mindshare, up 9.6% since last year.
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Massimo Banzi - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, efficient, allows the concurrent development of documentation and lets you add comments offline
An area for improvement in Atlassian Confluence is encouraging more vital interaction among the project members or users involved. I was researching a tool, but I forgot the exact name of the tool, and that tool could be used for better interactions offline among users on a specific topic, development, or discussion. I want that feature to be present in Atlassian Confluence. If there's a possibility to integrate Atlassian Confluence, Jira, and that other tool, that will make Atlassian Confluence better. My team had problems accessing Atlassian Confluence a couple of times, but I wonder if that was due to a network, server, or tool issue. I have to say that I've been working with Atlassian Confluence for years, and it has been improving its functionalities, so I feel that as a tool, it's working very well, but some features could still be improved. For example, the search engine should allow you to define some keywords you could use when searching, though I wonder if it's staff-related or setup-related, or lacking in the search engine function itself. I also want artificial intelligence added to Atlassian Confluence where you're working on a specific issue or argument, and Atlassian Confluence, through its AI, can propose some improvements based on what has been done on the same topic by different teams or different projects within the same infrastructure, similar to an internal reference, which can be helpful. Through AI, it would also be great if Atlassian Confluence could advise you on what has been done outside your specific project, and maybe there's the possibility of an installation where you have several projects installed and working together. Another feature that would be good to have in the next release of Atlassian Confluence is the tool recognizing a keyword or two that's fully developed in project B, which you can use in project A, for example.
WolfgangPichler - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to integrate, and enables our clients to guarantee compliance
The area of migrations to new versions must be made easier. It's quite good that they have now begun to improve the API area, to modernize the interfaces, but there's always a very big investment involved in migrating from one version to another. That prohibits rolling out new functionalities to customers. It's not so easy. You can't release a new version every three months to bring in new capabilities. That is the old-fashioned, the way it worked ten or 20 years ago. That is bad. In that area, they really must improve. We have FileNet, Content Manager, and TSM in our own installation. We migrated that installation three years ago to version 5.12. Now we have to migrate to 5.25 to bring in new facilities, and it's a big task. We have to do it in addition to our other tasks where we support customers. We need a parallel machine and to set it up there and to migrate step-by-step, then test it and roll it out. It's not so easy. That is a big area where there is much to be done to satisfy the needs of customers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features is its design documentation abilities."
"This is a scalable solution that supports thousands of users."
"It integrates well with other Atlassian products"
"The best feature is the automatic tagging of information in documents. The automatic algorithm highlights irrelevant information that conflict with the actual documents."
"I love the reports and the Confluence board."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is the accessibility from different sites for different colleagues and the search option."
"In terms of stability, we haven't experienced any big technical issues or downtime with IBM FileNet, which is a difference compared to smaller products."
"The most valuable features for us are Wex (Watson) for search, Datacap for OCR/ICR, and Automation Anywhere for RPA."
"The API's extensibility and new user interface are its most valuable features."
"It is used by large enterprises. It has to be scalable and robust for them to use. We have seen that on multiple projects over the years."
"I like the security and also the configuration. It is easy to configure and most of our business use cases have everything just with the configuration itself."
"The features that I have found most valuable include the Data Capture and Case Manager features."
"It is a faster, robust solution. The platform compatibility is very good."
"The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow."
 

Cons

"Atlassian Confluence's old versions consume too much memory, making it an area where optimization is required from an improvement perspective."
"There are some issues with performance when creating tables."
"The search function is not great."
"I would like to see more macros provided by the company included in the license."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"There could be an option to collaborate with other users while editing the documents."
"The dashboards should be improved."
"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."
"The response time and resolution of issues by technical support need improvement."
"The application's processing engineer needs to be more advanced."
"​I would like to see the dashboard be a little bit more robust and a little more user-friendly"
"It is stable as long as you create the right environment. We have had issues at times, but just because of configuration issues."
"It needs better collaboration between the IBM teams on the FileNet and CCM sides."
"The FileNet API seems like it is very difficult and not transparent."
"If I had a concern, it would be that we are sometimes not getting to the root cause of the issues from a technical standpoint as quickly as we should. For the most part, it's good. However, when things get a bit dicey with more involved issues, we have had some delays in getting feedback. If I had a concern, it's around the technical support and their responses in regards to things like root cause analysis."
"The new software and trends with the cloud solution is a little slow. I would like them to move toward more cloud-based and microservices rather than a SaaS model. This is where the industry is going and what customers are asking for."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything."
"This is a very expensive solution."
"When you purchase this solution you get some support."
"Making integration with other tools easier would be beneficial."
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, meaning its price falls somewhere in the mid-range zone."
"We have a site license for Atlassian Confluence and there are some limitations on external users."
"There is a license needed to use Atlassian Confluence."
"My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before."
"The cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance."
"When it comes to pricing, IBM needs to make an effort to improve the cost. That's the main issue regarding use of FinalNet in Columbia."
"The tool is expensive, and I rate its pricing a ten out of ten."
"FileNet is quite expensive, although Documentum is expensive too."
"FileNet is not cheap, but you absolutely get what you pay for. ​"
"It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed."
"The biggest issue is the cost of the FileNet, because the license cost is very high. If a customer doesn't have good technical guides that are aware of the license calculation, they will pay too much. FileNet's license calculation depends on the processor and number of users. So my advice to a new customer is to be very careful with your calculations before purchasing FileNet."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
74%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Insurance Company
9%
 

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?
Atlassian products, including Confluence, have yearly price increases of approximately five to twenty percent.
What needs improvement with Atlassian Confluence?
There is a significant difference between the data center version and the cloud version of Confluence. Providing the same features in both versions would be beneficial. Additionally, there is no fu...
What do you like most about IBM FileNet?
The product is robust and can process a lot of documents for enterprise content management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FileNet?
It depends on the business partner providing the solution to the customer. We have an ESA contract with IBM which allows us to offer the solution at a competitive price, providing added value when ...
What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?
The setup process is very complex, and I would prefer if it were easier. A modern interface would also be an enhancement.
 

Also Known As

Confluence
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Atlassian, Liferay and others in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals). Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.