Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Atlassian Confluence vs Zendesk 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 Knowledge Management Software
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (2nd)
Zendesk
Ranking in Knowledge Management Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (5th), CRM (21st), Help Desk Software (10th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (8th), Sales Force Automation (7th), Reporting (13th), Community Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Knowledge Management Software category, the mindshare of Atlassian Confluence is 24.6%, down from 25.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 18.5%, down from 19.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Knowledge Management Software
 

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.
Ahmed Nassar - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable tool, making it reliable for handling tasks but difficult initial setup
It has a huge problem regarding the price. The price increases every year. Every year, they raise the price of the licenses, which makes a lot of limitations, and you have to pay more. So that's some conditions. Actually, most of the companies that use Zendesk need a customer experience or customer care department. However, Zendesk only works with chatbox or emailing services, but it can also use Genesys, VoIP, or voice sensors. Additionally, Zendesk needs the administration panels to be easier because it's a very complex panel. You need to search for a lot of things to do, like a small job. So you have to do a lot of setup regarding the integration, and it's a little bit challenging to integrate any software in the vendor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I think that it is one of the best products on the market from my experience."
"With respect to our experiences with Confluence, we haven't had any issues."
"The scalability is enough for our use cases. It covers all our needs."
"Pricing is not a problem."
"It's easy to search for information."
"The integration's very good. You still have integration with lots of third party products, and it's very good."
"The macros feature in Confluence is quite valuable."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"I love how the tickets would auto-populate very quickly in Zendesk, especially when a call comes in."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to use, and I haven't encountered any issues with delays or communication gaps in ticket resolutions."
"The feature to move over my customer experience team tickets for different specialists is very valuable for my team."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. If you take the standalone product, it is so easy to use, but if you want a tailor-made Zendesk Guide, you can't do it yourself. However, you can use a template that already exists—they have a lot, and they're very cheap, around 300-400 euros—and use it on all your brands. It's a very easy product to use."
"It's very convenient to use."
 

Cons

"There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model."
"Atlassian needs to provide the source editor or a built-in plugin."
"Atlassian should rethink its withdrawal of the self-hosted version of the product. They only offer cloud-based service or the "datacenter-edition", which is quite expensive for small companies and private users."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve the stability, there are timeouts sometimes."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When editing a page with many iterations, it takes time to scroll down to the last iteration."
"There is always a network issue with Zendesk. But we don’t know whether it is managed. The network issue is that when I call, it does not let us."
"It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,"
"Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful."
"As per me, there arent much significant issues or areas for improvement with Zendesk, as my usage of it is limited. I appreciate its ability to organize tickets effectively based on tags, allowing me to easily gather and analyze customer feedback and requests."
"It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
"One of the drawbacks of Zendesk is that it doesn't provide a secure way for us to send data. So, we usually use a secure SharePoint folder link. We put that in the Zendesk ticket so that the requester has a secure way of getting to their data."
"Report generation is still slightly tricky and not very customizable as per my inquiries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license needed to use Atlassian Confluence."
"The issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons."
"I am using the paid version. My company has purchased it for company employees. We are using Confluence as a company. I don't know how much it costs, but its price is good enough. Its price is not so high."
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"For us, it's free to use. We don't pay any licensing."
"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."
"The price of the on-premises data center version is too expensive."
"This is a very expensive solution."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"The price is very competitive."
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Knowledge Management Software solutions are best for your needs.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
73%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Computer Software Company
21%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
I am not currently aware of the exact pricing, but since we are still using Zendesk, it appears to be at a reasonable price point.
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
Report generation is still slightly tricky and not very customizable as per my inquiries. It would be advantageous to have an AI layer that can analyze incoming requests and generate summaries, as ...
 

Also Known As

Confluence
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian Confluence vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.