Confluence Reviews

Confluence, My Most Reliable Tool

Comments: It's been incredible and we've been slowly breaking away from random documents in inboxes, desktops, Sharepoint, OneDrive and centralizing the information. It's been amazing.

Pros:

#1 I love Confluence, as it's so user friendly and so simple to use. I've taken it and built out the structure at my new company, as well as previous ones to make our shared Confluence space a HUB for our Documentation, Meetings Customers/Projects/Team, Resources, Planning, you name it. It's so easy and it's a great way to keep everyone informed and involved. AND you can customize how it looks.

Cons:

Not much I dislike. Maybe if I could have a few more customization options, but that is about it.

Excelent tool with good Admins and Users

Comments: I personally had a wonderful experience with Confluence, it was a easy one link way to add most resources required (Gantt charts , project plans, date/time for Program Management timelines and mixed together you get a easy to use tool that is great at its core but with heavy customization it becomes even more awesome).You can basically start from a white blank page and end up doing a project charter with 2 attached Gantt charts, with 3 Children pages and 7 Pie Charts.

Pros:

It is easily accessible and you have loads of feature to customize your knowledge(renging from Tables , custom built Boards and even Linking tickets makes it a very straight forward solution for knowledge capture) pages or project management files , tools are easy to integrate and work with (highly recommend a cooperation with Jira , as they work very well togather.)

Cons:

Administration part can be a pain from time to time , unless you know exactly what roles are correct , it can become a bit confusing .

Great for collaboration, terrible as a knowledge base

Comments: It puts documentation all in one place.

Pros:

We use the cloud version for customer facing knowledge base (KB). A great tool for creating and maintaining documentation and how-to articles. Allows for numerous contributors, there are a lot of add-ons for features and functionality within a document. Syncs well with other Atlassian tools. Theme controls are fairly robust. The search is in depth and comprehensive, returns results from tags and body of a page or article. User community and KB is very helpful and responsive.

Cons:

Our users are our customers, so inviting confusing and creating users is convoluted and limited. Once you designate the space as a KB, Confluence should provide user access in a way unique to a KB, but it the invitation process is still worded like a collaboration tool AND emails are NOT customizable. Users get bombarded by emails when a page is updated. The default setting is to have all users automatically watching the entire space, so when any update is made multiple emails are sent. You CANNOT set the user or group defaults for email preferences. SSO capabilities are not available in the cloud version. The user web service is severely limited and does not solve the issue. While there are a ton of add-ons from the marketplace, they are all 3rd party and these can deliver way more than Atlassian's supported offerings. This was a pro, but the con is that they are also limited to what they can tie into. We tried to use a theme from the market place, but it did not support the comprehensive search capabilities, only returned tags. Admin navigation is confusing, I use the product every day, yet I am constantly fumbling around trying to find where to go to do what I'm trying to do.

Confluence emerges as a versatile collaboration tool with distinguishing features

Comments: Structured content creation has transformed the way our team gathers and disseminates information. Our workflow has been unified due to the smooth integration with our existing products, which has increased efficiency and reduced the need for continual context switching. The adaptability of Confluence is extremely empowering.

Pros:

Confluence is a dynamic collaboration tool that enables teams to easily create, share, and interact. Its capabilities for structured content development and integration improve productivity and knowledge sharing. While improving its learning curve and multimedia features would enhance the experience, Confluence's overall benefits make it a valuable asset for companies seeking to improve collaboration. For starters, its dynamic and structured approach to content production enables teams to develop, organize, and share material in real-time. This encourages knowledge sharing and speeds up project progress. Confluence's integration features help to streamline workflows by connecting with a wide range of applications, resulting in a more cohesive and efficient work environment.

Cons:

The platform's sophistication may present a minor learning curve for novices, particularly those unfamiliar with collaborative software. Furthermore, while Confluence excels at text-based material, its multimedia embedding and formatting choices may be improved to provide a more aesthetically engaging experience.

Excellent knowledge base and group collaboration platform

Comments: I appreciate the simplicity of the Confluence platform because it has been really helpful to my company. The intuitive design makes it simple to disseminate internal communications and choices made in meetings.

Pros:

It's the greatest centralized location for everyone involved in a project or at a company to store, share, and retrieve information and data. It's helpful for teamwork because it's simple to edit, it syncs with Jira, and it can provide useful visual representations of data.

Cons:

The design of Confluence just seems archaic and cumbersome to me. It's also difficult to allow access, and to copy and paste across other applications like Microsoft Office.

Simple business knowledge management tool

Comments: Its adaptability is its confluence. It has several potential applications, including but not limited to the drafting of documents and the coordination of group efforts. I also appreciate that newcomers to wiki software can quickly become productive with Confluence.

Pros:

You can design your own page layouts in Confluence and use them for your content. This facilitates the development of uniform, expert-looking web pages. Using Confluence's built-in macro functionality, you can easily incorporate data-driven elements like tables, charts, and photos into your pages. The ability to leave comments on Confluence pages facilitates conversation and furthers teamwork.

Cons:

One of my biggest gripes with Confluence is how sluggish and unresponsive it can be at times. When working on a group project, this can be very irritating. In addition, the search function isn't always the most refined, and it may take some time to locate the data you require.

Web based software which helps in content management activities

Comments: My experience with confluence is very good it help me to manage day to day to activity like sprint planning, leave tracking of employees and other details.

Pros:

It helps organization to manage the software development. It is a knowledge base which primarily handle content management activities

Cons:

Nothing as of now as it has lot of advantages

Great alternative to Sharepoint

Pros:

Confluence is really great to manage documents and procedures outside of Sharepoint which I think is it's greatest competitor . It's however a lot easier to learn than Sharepoint

Cons:

Like anything, it has a slight learning curve but not as steep as O365

Ease of use and excellent integrations

Pros:

Coming into Confluence as a new user with limited knowledge of Agile software applications, I found Confluence to be a little overwhelming. However, the provided documentation allowed me to see just how capable the application can be. While I was probably using a fairly small % of the total capabilities of this application, I found the integrations and add-ons to be invaluable as I worked through integrating this into my business needs. Customer support was excellent as well. As a new and novice user, I relied on them for support enough times to know that I could get high quality help relatively quickly. The support team seemed to truly care about my experience and took a proactive approach in solving any problems I was having.

Cons:

Initially it felt a little overwhelming, and I realized that unless I set it up properly from the start, it was hard to go back and change original settings without starting a new project or scrapping my account and starting over.

It’s more intelligent in work and amazing in management.

Comments: The benefits of this product through my experience is that it is multi-functional in working for the best results, really amazing

Pros:

This product is really great and features several functions for development and management of projects and others at work.

Cons:

It’s strength lies in intelligence in action and good measure.

For a wiki software the FREE tier is decent. If you're planning to pay there are better options

Comments: We've been strongly recommended by colleagues to use this software as our main Wiki. We really did test A LOT of software before, and at first we were excited about Confluence. However, after about 1 year of use we decided to drop it. It might be suitable for big, heavy, slow by nature organizations, but not for an agile SMB that needs to operate fast to get ahead. The software is buggy, unnecessarily complex, and very restricting in nature. For our purposes using Clickup Docs, Google Sites, Notion, or any other countless simpler options proved a more sane choice. Hoping Confluence will improve the software, because there's lots of potential. However, with the current limitations we don't see ourselves giving it another chance.

Pros:

The software provides a rather generous free tier. The search capabilities are quite good, and there are many page formatting options, which makes it quite a good Wiki software potentially. However, the bugs and shortcomings of this software renders it rather unusable for us.

Cons:

The software is VERY buggy, tends to crash unexpectedly (we tested it on strong machines, across users and browsers). It takes FOREVER to login. Getting to your Wiki takes lots of unnecessary clicks. What's worst is that each page must hold a unique names, so if for example you plan to create several page structures (with subpages and so on) with similar names, forget about it. It's due to the legacy architectural structure of the software, and can't be easily changed. Unfortunately, that what makes it fall behind. We dropped it for favor of modern alternatives.

Best knowledge management and wiki out there

Comments: If you use other Atlassian products, Confluence is the perfect complement. Because exporting documents is so bad, it works best if you, your colleagues and your stakeholders/clients all exist in the same Atlassian ecosystem.

Pros:

Highly configurable and easy to use document templates, beautiful interface akin to using Medium, and deep integration with Jira Software and Jira Service Management are the features I find most useful. Recent changes to Templates to enable you to quickly search and preview available templates is incredibly helpful, as inline commenting while editing and being able to quickly convert anything into a Jira issue. Being able to use Confluence to defer service management requests by offering reporters the option of self serving an answer to their question/problem is a stroke of genius.

Cons:

It's beyond irritating that exporting documents as a PDF is so horrendous out of the box. I also find the concept of Actions vs Jira issues confusing. I consistently find myself missing actions that have been buried in Confluence.

Very flexible collaboration tools

Comments: Main issue that we have solved with this software is, sharing and giving access of document to certain user from various department. It help to protect the document and it will give insight if the document has been edited and the editor of the document.

Pros:

I really like that Confluence is very flexible in managing collaboration of documentation and task. Creating a document and stored it in the cloud storage provided by this platform make the sharing process of the document is very easy and flawless and the document will only circulated inside the software which add more security to the document.

Cons:

The only thing that i have problem with this software is, the full text search is not properly constructed. Too many unrelated search result is returned and that mean it is not accurate. I need to scan the result manually to find the document that i need and that action is taking time and slowing me down.

Great documentation platform for both intranets and customer-facing hubs

Comments: The experience I had the last 9-10 years that me and my colleagues worked with Confluence is excellent. The document editor works smoothly even from the mobile app that is offered. There are many article templates to choose from when you start creating an article, from decision making documents to marketing strategy forms and solution focused how-to pages. Confluence supports a lot of media types in the pages, so it's easy to create helpful articles with video, audio, images and many more like attention panels, embedded spreadsheets, etc. You can even embed the contents of one section of a page to another page, so that if you change that it reflects the change in all the pages that the section was included. Which is great for customer support and of course technical documentation. Did I mention that you can create as many different wikis as you like? Confluence calls those "spaces" and it's a great way to keep things separated. I use different wiki spaces for my employees handbook, customer support, app manuals, design documents per project, etc. The possibilities are endless and having them separately helps with security between different roles in the company and outside of it.

Pros:

Confluence, especially the new cloud version, is one of the best tools to use for documenting your knowledge-base. The best parts for me are: - The ability to connect my articles with to-do tasks from project management (Jira from Atlassian, same company, so they work like a charm together). - The articles I can contain any media types, from spreadsheets that I can edit in-line to videos. There are also a lot of native panels to help anybody create very stylish articles with usability. - In-line and footer comment sections help my team discuss and develop documents all together, without losing any of the discussion history. - The ability to also keep an internal blog. I use that to inform my colleagues for the day-to-day developments, and keep everybody on track with high ideas and management efforts. - All of the above can be also used as a customer-facing knowledge-base, to serve your customers with documents, operation manuals and help articles. Very handy if you use it together with the service desk solution from the same company, but can also be used stand-alone too. In general it's one of the best choices that I made when I was searching for a documentation solution for my company and my clients, back in 2010. Almost a decade passed and Confluence is still growing better and better by the time. Atlassian the company behind Confluence is now huge and offers many solutions that integrate with Confluence, making it an even better choice if you use other tools from them.

Cons:

I can't find any cons to Confluence. After all there is no perfect solution, only elegant ones depending on the problem one tries to solve. Atlassian is offering a trial period so anybody can see if Confluence is good for their company's documentation needs. From my experience, it would be bad to start a trial before you hove some really motivated people in your team and some content to put in there. Because it would be better to test Confluence with something that you would use in your company, so that you see first hand the pros and cons while your team works with Confluence with material that is close to the true material that you would put in there. If I was to change one thing it would be the way it recognizes internally any of the pages I create, so that Confluence doesn't have any issues with pages with same titles. That would be a nice time saver and space saver in the outline of any wiki one creates.

Powerful wiki software

Comments: Confluence has become the place for us to collect information, across our business. We use it document our processes and policies (the access controls prove useful there), and our development teams use it on a daily basis to record the outcomes of discussions and to share knowledge.

Pros:

Confluence does a good job as a tool for writing, organising and viewing all kinds of documentation. It's fairly wiki-esque, but with a more intuitive editor for pages that should make it easier to pick up for new users that might be more familiar with, say, Microsoft Word. As an Atlassian product, you can expect a full set of tools for managing access to different pages and areas across your organisation, making it more appropriate for enterprises than more basic wiki software that doesn't always provide the same level of control. Another advantage is the high level of integration. 'Macros' allow users to include a variety of rich content, and are customisable. Examples of integrations include JIRA, Trello, Microsoft Office, G Suite, and more. The 'Atlassian Marketplace' can be used to find and install more macros.

Cons:

Although the editor is easier to use than the markdown used by a lot of other wiki software, it can occasionally be frustrating to work with. Not all macros and formatting settings behave exactly the same, so while you'd be able to fix these issues directly in markdown, you can end up trying out a bunch of different tools before you find the one you need to achieve your goal. As with all collections of articles, organising pages can become difficult. The software itself provides basic tools that allow you to define a structure for your pages, and these work well, but it still requires considerable discipline as your use of the software scales up.

Easy and Simple Enterprise knowledge base and document management system

Comments: Confluence is really good for organizing all of your company/teams requirements related to content, document, knowledge management and file management. Its a must for any company which is dependent on content and content based activities.

Pros:

From the word go, our team was able to jump start and create a solid knowledge base for our entire enterprise. Being in Education and E-Learning domain - content is the heart of our business. Managing content created by various teams inside company, partner contributions, freelancers content is extremely crucial and critical. Some of the most important features of this product for us are: Document Management, Knowledge base, Version Control System, Structured Pages, Search

Cons:

Confluence product does content related work really well. But that's not enough as we have grown in last 3 years and so are our requirements. Integrations with forms, data collections, Kanban board, tasks etc have become kind of a must rather than good to have features. We are currently on the premium plan and $10 per user for just managing document and collaboration seems little too much, specially when there are products which provide much more for less.

An In-Depth Review of Confluence

Comments: Overall, Confluence is an excellent collaboration platform. Its intuitive interface and powerful features make it easy to set up and use, and it's a great way for teams to store, share, and collaborate on documents, notes, tasks, and more.

Pros:

Confluence is an incredibly powerful and flexible collaboration platform for teams. It enables teams to easily store, share, and collaborate on documents, notes, tasks, and more. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, making it simple for teams to get started quickly. It also has a wide range of powerful features, including powerful search capabilities, easy-to-use editing tools, and the ability to create custom workflows.

Cons:

While Confluence is a powerful collaboration platform, it can be a bit overwhelming for users who aren't familiar with the platform. Additionally, the cost of using Confluence can be prohibitive for smaller teams.

Good software, but not quite GREAT software.

Comments: We needed a document/knowledge depository. We ended up using Confluence for Knowledge Depository, it had too many limitations and too expensive to integration to use for Document Management. It did the job for knowledge management, but was very similar in features and functionality to other products that do this as well. We tried to adapt it for Customer Success management and meeting note taking but many users found it too difficult to use it regularly and it became shelf ware for this purpose.

Pros:

I like the version control features of Confluence, it's very easy to use and visibly see changes. Being able to build account dashboards with tasks from various business reviews was also a nice feature though had some limitations.

Cons:

The bullets formatting can be very frustrating and acts very strange sometimes. Confusing sign-in credentials for SSO when used with JIRA.

Confluence - Our Intranet

Comments: My overall experience with Confluence is both positive and negative. For example, the add-on apps can work wonderfully (e.g. our Smart Course LMS is working splendidly for basic onboarding purposes) and as long as one knows how to use the (advanced) search tool, ideally, nothing is hidden. However, experience shows that for those who only occasionally wonder into Confluence, despite all the tags, labels, tables of content and careful structuring of our spaces - it comes off as a labyrinth. It is still more maintainable than Google Drive, though, and it that we trust (no disrespect to Drive: we are also using that to store sensitive, access restricted data - same chimeric results over the past 15 years but we consider it a necessary downside to all knowledge management aiding tools we tried so far...)

Pros:

Confluence is a double-edged sword.PRO: On the one hand, it allows you to create, store and organize data and processes, for example (we mostly use it for our handbook, guidelines, general good-to-know's and how-to articles).

Cons:

CON: On the other hand, if left unchecked, Confluence can easily become a synonym to Chimera: a chaos of information in various disguises across multiple spaces. If you try to clean up one section, the same bits of data might crop up without notice elsewhere.

Confluence: the hub for knowledge management

Comments: Overall, I use Confluence every day in my work to keep my (and my organization's) knowledge base relevant. I use to it to collaborate with other employees for improving internal processes, as well as for communicating important current info (such as outages or key developments). Confluence is unmatched in its search functionality, and allows my organization to keep its knowledge base completely streamlined.

Pros:

I use Confluence as a customer service employee. We have a vast amount of procedures for managing internal systems, as well as for applying systems to actual contact with customers. All of these procedures are stored and maintained in Confluence. What helps me the most, is Confluence's super-advanced search functionality. Essentially, I merely have to type in a relevant word, and Confluence will list all the applicable articles. This allows me to find a relevant procedure for a specific situation in seconds. Another important feature to me is the commenting system. I collaborate with users who create and manage articles. When I see info in an article that's outdated or incorrect, I can leave a comment, and the article manager will get a notification. It's easy to collaborate in this way and keep information up-to-date. Lastly, the permission schemes help with keeping editing (or even viewing rights) limited to the relevant users. Within customer service this is important, as there are varying levels of authorization within our organisation.

Cons:

In my opinion, the user experience and readability of the software could be improved slightly. The color scheme of blue/white/black isn't bad, but the layout tends to be somewhat messy. It could benefit from some streamlining, and perhaps more clear demarcation of elements within pages (such as more use of bold / italics, more variance in font size, and use of headers).

Versatile, powerfull, easy to use

Comments: As with other Atlassien products Confluence is just a charm to use. It is a great Wiki and it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving the more atlassian products you combine with it. I would absolutely chose Confluence again in the past and in the future. If you manage it smart (by setting up well conceptualized wiki spaces and making people patreons of certain areas in order to avoid cluttering) I could not imagine any solution better suited to Knowledge management and business documentation than Confluence.

Pros:

We use Confluence for serval years now, together with Jira (Ticket Management) and Bamboo (Build Server). It has proven its value time and again for us and provided us with clear, easy to navigate and edit business documentation for almost all areas of business. The Editor is esy to use, there are Plugins for all imaginable use cases (for example specific PDF exports) and a great FAQ and very helpful community. The Editor for content is fantastically in terms of ease of use and results to be generated. Also all Articles are stored versioned, so you can easyly go back a version, or check what has been changed in case you have to get back up to speed on a topic you left checking a while ago. You can follow authors, topics or wiki Spaces so Confluence keeps you in the loop about what is happening. In case you work on confidential material the user access management is just a dream to use, simple, powerful and without any ruged edges. Additional Features are added and when they are they are well thought through and perfectly conceptualized. I never have found a feature which did not deliver what it promised and more. Some are not for me but the ones that were introduced and sounded interesting generally were. This is THE tool for anyone who wants to document all kinds ok business knowledge from simple things like HowTo or FAQ Article to complex branches of deccsion documentations connected to development progress (by Jira ticket integration).

Cons:

Confluence has a lot of great features. The main Issue with Wiki Systems often is they work great in teh beginning and later become bogged down with badly maintained content or just forgotten structures. The search for the wiki still is not perfect. It has improved and is fine to use but I have seen better. There are also not a lot of features that support administrators in decluttering a large or huge Wiki and sometimes we had issues for complex, nested user rights. Also as always the case when you have an ecosystem of plugins, you have to make sure anything is compatible with a new version before you update, especially if it is a third party extension. Don't get me wrong, there is not much to complain here, you have to really look hard in order to find anything bad about Confluence.

Best documentation tool I ever used

Comments: I use this almos daily and I think it is a great tool for team performance. It allows to create and view all the info in no time and pretty well structured.

Pros:

The main advantage about Confluence is that is part of the Atlassian Suite which involves Jira and Bitbucket among others. This makes pretty easy to integrate them and add quick references to a jira issue with just write the reference number. The text editor in Confluence is pretty complete, allowing to create really decent pages for any kind of documentation desired. The possibility of create nested pages makes really easy to organize the information in "chapters" "sub-chapters" and so on, giving your documentation a really neat look. This feature also allows to segregate the information, so you can have your product's documentation on one place, perfectly organized and set another "Chapter" for your team info, where you could store info about code conventions, timetables about overtime or availability, and so on. Confluence is also useful in order to create software designs, since it allows to create pages where you can paste your diagrams and so on and allows to discuss on them by adding comments or remarks. And the Watch utility keep you posted via e-mail whenever a page you're watching is modified in any way so you can keep track of a discussion or whatever.

Cons:

So far didn't find any big issue with confluence. Maybe for beginners it has a bit of learning curve and some option like the page nesting and so on is a bit difficult to learn. Besides that, I think is a pretty complete software. Something I miss is the possibility of "downloading" a page with all nested ones into a pdf. That would be a great feature in order to generate documentation files.

Confluence for Team collaboration

Comments: My overall business experience is great. Earlier team was sharing project content via emails that is a clumsy way to mamage and store the information, but as more and more people are using confluence it has become a repository and one stop shop to put knowledge at one palce which can be referred as and when needed. This is a great tool and a game changer for how we manage our collaboration within team for the project under Agile way

Pros:

The best part about this software is the close integration with JIRA software. This is in real competition with Sharepoint as far as my understanding goes and I am an admin user for multiple scrum teams in my organization. Confluence in its own way is by far the easiest user-friendly software that I introduced in my team that was new to the agile world and now all our collaboration and communication on the process and tech document standpoint happens on Confluence. The comment section and different macros that can be added for adding content on a page and tree structure for pages created give this tool the edge and flexibility for teams to create the format that best suits to specific scrum team needs The technical document and usage of code snippet macro are very useful add-ons that have been given for formatting the content. from the project management standpoint, the product backlog and release planning can be done simply by adding JIRA tickets and their specific status that automatically is being fetched by confluence every time page is opened. The other most important feature is the ability to create JIRA tickets directly from the confluence page just select the text and then Confluence will give an option to create JIRA ticket and gets linked The reporting macros for JIRA tickets is a good way to track progress of projects

Cons:

At an enterprise level, there are few web designing that is required to be done so that content that is already there can be structured in a much more web design format like links to confluence pages to be embedded in an image. That option is available but to central Admin and not to the page admin that makes confluence little crunched to admin users within a project. But this negative point is a very small piece in comparison to positives with this application.

Review about Confluence

Pros:

Document managementCollaborationKnowledge managementIntegration with other tools

Cons:

Complexity: Confluence is a powerful tool with many features and capabilities, which can make it somewhat complex to set up and use effectively. It may take some time for users to become familiar with all of its features.Cost: While Confluence offers a free version, its more advanced features are only available with paid subscriptions, which can be expensive for some organizations.Customization: While Confluence is highly configurable, making extensive customizations may require some technical knowledge or expertise.User interface - Little bit tricky

Helpful Tool

Comments: Overall I would recommend using Confluence, but would caution people on how they rollout the new platform to their company. Ensuring that the expectations are communicated clearly for how the platform will be used, by whom and the frequency, are very helpful things to communicate when preparing your team to switch.

Pros:

The interactive features of Confluence serves as the best feature and function of this platform! Our organization is relatively small (20-30 employees) and is a Foundation that interacts with other nonprofits in the area. As a result we had many touch points in the community through various teams and often time what we were doing would get lost. In an effort to improve our internal communication our organization adopted Confluence as a means of servicing our company. We used the blog feature heavily which proved to be the best method of communication internally and cut down on the amount of emails adding to the clutter in our inboxes. It also allowed discussions to happen seamlessly and served as a point of reference for folks to easily access when needed.

Cons:

It wasn't always very user friendly. Our organization consists of a variety of ages, so the way that people have engaged with technology is also varied. There are times that adding spaces or pages have proved to be a challenge for those who don't consider themselves as "technologically savvy". There was a bit of a learning curve for me in learning to how to use the software, but the customer support team was helpful in walking me through difficulties. The mobile function also wasn't the best depending on how users have different spaces setup.