What needs improvement with Atlassian Confluence?

There's room for improvement in the way folders are structured in Atlassian Confluence. Sometimes it's frustrating when we have two documents that we want to have the same name. For instance, we might have two different products with a release going out on the same day, and we might want to label those documents with the same title but in different subfolders. However, it's difficult to provide specifics of what could be better.

Currently, I have no suggestions for improvements. There are no issues with stability or downtime 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 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.

The software does not currently have any kind of AI integration. Given that many platforms are now incorporating AI, I believe Confluence should also consider AI integration. Additionally, a few more editing features could be added. Compared to a Word document, there are some limitations in Confluence. While we use Confluence mainly as a repository, more options similar to those available in Word or Google Docs in terms of formatting and other features could enhance its functionality.

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 functionality in Confluence to have a team title as a home page header and footer on each page export, which is something I've requested from Atlassian.

I'm facing issues using macros like 'expand'. When editing a page with many iterations, it takes time to scroll down to the last iteration. I want to make the permissions in the calendar feature more manageable. I want to prevent anyone in the team from creating a new event and allow them only to add their vacation, as creating a new event should be an admin permission.

The discoverability of documents could be improved. In scenarios where documents are managed by another department or we are looking for specific documents, the process could be enhanced for easier discovery.

Indentation and other basic word processing styles must be improved. However, it is limited to editing HTML.

I would say that 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 the templates in Atlassian Confluence. In our company, when some team members try to edit the templates in the product, they get stuck. There were complaints about the templates being less refined. When the components increase in the template, the product's users in our company get stuck, making it in an area where improvements are required. It would be great if Atlassian Confluence could integrate with Microsoft Teams since it would allow our company to use just one tool instead of two. The quality of the technical support needs improvement.

Atlassian Confluence is not really a community-friendly solution. If you have a company, you'll have a license for each person, but it does not have such features as commenters. For example, Jira Service Desk has licensed agents and customers who are public and not licensed. Atlassian Confluence has no public type of users who can comment or do any activity without a license.

The area that needs improvement is the search capability. It should have generalized capabilities. The support should be better when it comes to analytics features.

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. In my case, the governance aspect is the most important. It doesn't work well with a huge company, and it's not as effective as it could be for software developers. Moreover, there is an area of improvement in the governance functionality within Confluence, especially for large companies like ours, to have a more sophisticated governance solution associated with Confluence.

The solution's user experience needs to be improved. The solution is not very user-friendly. From my perspective, it should be more user-friendly. In the future, the solution should be able to integrate with other tools. I think it is integrated only with Jira. But there are other tools with which it could also be integrated. We should be able to integrate this tool to get a trace of what information we are gathering. Maybe it is only possible for Jira because it is a Jira product.

I would like Confluence to include the ability to draw flowcharts and diagrams. There's a small tool that you can use to draw, but it was very cumbersome. When you have to import or paste the pictures, you have to get that information into the table columns. When you're merging or unmerging, the table can break. Copy and paste on Excel doesn't work easily because Excel is the primary tool that most people use. Excel is very easy to use. Confluence has issues with usability. It's slightly cumbersome. If they made it more usable with Excel and drawings, it would be a much more powerful tool.

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.

This solution should have customized dashboards that could be built by the user and connect to the data and filtering mechanisms to create dashboards. It will be great for any C-level executive to monitor their KPIs rather than depend on somebody else to create them. So, the dashboards should be improved.

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.

The cost of the solution is too high.

I work with Confluence, however, I'm not sure what's lacking. The price could be improved. I have heard that certain adjustments would be made in 2024 and that it will then be more expensive, but I don't know the specifics.

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.

Some elements of the user interface could be more user-friendly, including embedding diagrams. In the next release, I'd like to see better integration with diagramming tools or software architecture.

It has good integrations, but its integration capabilities can be improved. They can improve the table feature of Confluence. It is currently not adequate.

Nowadays, the standard for documentation for developers is mostly in Markdown, so pretty much everything we can do is in the Markdown language. The support for Confluence to import something that's in Markdown is not that great. Sometimes it's also not that great when it comes to including code snippets or similar things, so I think the couple of improvement areas would be around Markdown support and support for adding code. As for added features, I would like to see more flexibility in the way we can design a workflow in Confluence, and maybe some templates that we can use based on the purpose of the document. I would also like to see more integration with other common application services. Other than draw.io, there is not much integration to other services like Lucidchart or similar services, which are helpful for reporting your documentation with drawings and architecture diagrams. Those improvements would make it a bit more user-friendly.

The solution does have tons of features, but sometimes we don't want every feature to be there, we just want a basic solution. They don't offer the option to customize the package, so you get everything with the one bundle price. Maybe we're only using 10% of it, but we have to pay for everything. There needs to be a flexible pricing model, where we can pick and choose services and customize our pricing model.

The search function is not great. That's one area where we feel that Confluence is lacking. The second issue is that an additional license is required when you are sharing data externally. There are a couple of instances where we've had integration issues with other apps and that needs to be improved. I'd like to see more of a workflow process. For example, an approval process, where you get through one layer and then go to the next layer, like the process that SharePoint has.

The flexibility and simplicity of this solution could be improved. We would also like the ability to add plugins.

Managing user permissions and credentials could be easier.

The performance could be improved, we sometimes run into difficulties creating tables.

I'd like to see some improved reporting on usage.

The scalability for larger companies could be improved. Atlassian has decided to stop the server edition of Atlassian Confluence. In the future, you can only buy an enterprise installation called Data Center, and you have to pay for a thousand users on up. This means that it will be very expensive. So, small installations will only have the cloud option, but the cloud version of Atlassian Confluence is not as stable as the on-premises version. It would be good to have more graphical components on dashboards to show table components as graphics, pie charts or bar charts. These are not included at the moment.

Due to the fact that there are so many diverse plugins available, the solution really isn't missing any features. The product is considered expensive. In the future, I would like to be able to copy from other documents, local documents on your PC, and paste them into Confluence pages while keeping the formatting. At the moment, you can copy and paste, however, all your formatting disappears. This is one of the features that I would want. In terms of the feature for uploading documents, at the moment, when you want to upload documents from your local PC into Confluence, you can do it. However, when you want to make updates on your document, you need to download it from Confluence, make the changes in the document, and then upload it again. Instead of doing this, instead of downloading the document from Confluence, it's better to have the possibility to make your changes in Confluence and open the document in Confluence instead of downloading everything.

The user interface could be improved.

An area for improvement would be the intuitiveness of using the features, especially if you want to customize. In the next release, I would like to see an instant messaging feature for document collaboration.

Some aspects of the drawing perspective could be improved. When we upgrade a design and make technical architecture drawings to publish, we still use Visio first and then copy and paste it. If this feature were available on Confluence, it would be a useful tool.

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. I have been using and recommending Atlassian Confluence for more than four years now, and never had to regret it until the end of 2020, when they suddenly got this cloud madness. Not only does the cloud version come nowhere near the responsiveness of the self-hosted version (which is a matter of course, as self-hosted servers are within the LAN with single-digit milliseconds of round trip time, whereas cloud-hosted servers will always have 20+ ms), but also it requires a customer to entrust their data to a third party, which is in many cases a no-go. The only way out would be to buy the "datacenter edition" and thus spend a whole lot more money on the product. This may be what Atlassian intended in the first place and if so, shame on them. With that, I will no longer recommend the product, as I am opposed to the cloud-first hype. Our data should be our own and we should be free to decide where we store them.

Space maintenance could be made a little more user-friendly.

With respect to Confluence, it would be interesting if they had graphical templates that allowed typical agile ceremonies to be documented better. For example, one of the agile cadences that we regularly run is risk roaming. Confluence, as of now, doesn't provide any kind of graphical support for creating a two-by-two portfolio matrix design or even something similar. Basically, Confluence is heavily text-based. Some of my customers have actually started to tweak the system a bit and implement workarounds. On the screen, you can make it look as if it is a two-by-two portfolio; however, if there were templates provided, that would be great. The basic graphical templates that are used regularly in management would be fine. It would be great to see them supported in the future. In regards to Jira, it would be nice if they had two-dimensional features for backlog support. At the moment, backlog management is always a flat, one-dimensional list but our customers actually prefer having the opportunity to have that read out in a graphical fashion as well. That way, there's so much more overview and they can cluster smaller backlog items that come as a bunch. It just provides much more clarity. Jira still seems to have issues on modelling Kanban-systems - as far as I know it still doesn't support the so-called "commitment point" (i.e. creating a non-romovable time-stamp when moving a ticket onto a board) helpful in creating transparency about start- and end-time of performing an activity — similar to signing a document in writing. Think of it this way: if you take an item into a boardroom, it must be noted and signed. It should be done in pencil where the data could be erased later on, rather, it should be stamped — basically, you are not losing the data again. That is still an issue with these systems. That's one of the reasons why many teams who want to run Kanban methodology don't want to use Jira. They tend to use other software, which is able to do these sorts of things.

They can easily take on some of the features from Slack. They could try and copy Slack more and bring them into the market a bit quicker. That would be helpful for them. I would like to see integration with Slack. There could be improvements with the app ecosystem. For example, if we look at Teams, there is now an entire ecosystem. With Teams, you can essentially install any apps and do any integrations. Third-party, similar to Microsoft. It's more about integrations with third parties. That is also something that could be better. I think it can be more competitive, considering the competition they are now going to get from Slack and Teams. For example, if you look at Microsoft Teams, Microsoft is providing 365 for free with Slack.

Workflows is an area where it could be improved. Out-of-the-box, it does not have a good workflow solution, which is a bit odd given that there is a good workforce solution in Jira software. We had to purchase a workflow management tool off the marketplace called Kamala and that probably should not have been necessary. So, they could probably do with a bit of development on the workflows front to include a better solution out-of-the-box, but other than that, not a lot needs to be improved.

We've used a lot of time in correcting our knowledge in this product. Can't really think of a negative feature of the product. This is kind of by design, however, the lack of control in terms of editing the page to make it look the way you want it to look is an issue. It would be nice if there was more flexibility there. It's only a very constrained format you can use. You cannot change the font and you can't really make them smaller. It is by design, but it doesn't like people playing with those aspects. It's probably gone a bit too far. The inability to format the layout of a page is an issue for us. The logic for searching for pages is a bit off. I assumed it would be very smart in terms of looking at the content on your page and looking at what people clicked on. I assumed it would be like Google in that it would know what people clicked on previously when they were looking for this keyword, what page do they click on, et cetera. It doesn't. I found some detailed explanation of exactly how the search works and it's quite disappointing. It's very basic. Search largely depends on the title of your actual document. It doesn't look at the words in the document, and doesn't look at the search history, in terms of how people pick pages. It turns out that the searching algorithms are very basic. When I assumed the product was bad, it was actually due to the fact that most of the knowledge management tools have very smart searching logic. This one doesn't.

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.

The UI is good but bland. It could be updated a bit to make it more modern and interesting to look at.

The standard table capability is substandard and virtually unusable. However with the "Advanced Tables for Confluence" from Bob Swift, this problem was solved. The standard table functionality does not have enough functionality to document things clearly starting with colors. The other tool which is extremely useful is IO Draw although it is expensive. With these two extensions, I was able to really maximize my use of Confluence.

Confluence textual editor could be improved and integrated with MS Word for easy usage and better formatting of documents.

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.