Confluence Reviews

Real-time simultaneous editing
Ease of finding and organizing what I've written
Constantly adding new features
Integration with Jira and Trello is great, but also works as lightweight project management by itself

Honestly, they've fixed my biggest cons, like storage space (now you can buy a bigger plan) and they keep adding more things.
I think my colleagues would say there's still a learning curve, which is understandable, and I think Confluence has been changing the interface with more tips and features for new users (which is sometimes confusing for long-time users like me, LOL)
One big con is still the limited integration with MS Office. Confluence fully replaces the need for Word in most cases, so that's not a big deal, but I wish the Excel integration and/or the table functionality was better.
Also, printing is pretty tough when you have tables.

Atlassian Confluence is a platform for teamwork and information exchange that has helped our company greatly improve its operations. The platform is accessible to all users and features a straightforward interface, enabling our company to set up shared workspaces where employees can efficiently complete a wide range of assignments. It's steady, and it's facilitated the simple expansion of our holdings.

There was a difficult learning curve for some of our less tech-savvy consumers to become proficient on the site. Some users may find it inconvenient that customer service is only offered in English.

It's incredibly simple to work collaboratively and provide feedback on written documents using this platform. Its "wiki on steroids" approach is particularly effective for overcoming writer's block, allowing users to start writing without hesitation and continuously improve their work.In addition, the tool's seamless integration of pages and information, as well as its ability to connect with Jira and extract relevant data, are noteworthy.

Many essential features are only accessible through paid plugins, which is disappointing. For instance, the team calendar should be a standard feature available to all users.Furthermore, the administrative features are often difficult to use and unclear, particularly for larger organizations that require a greater degree of granularity.The pricing model for the plugins is also problematic. For example, users are required to purchase a license for each person on the platform, even if only a small number of individuals will use the plugin.

I like the task tracking. You can easily see from a big picture where projects are at in terms of progress.

The search feature. It is extremely difficult to find what you want. You have to watch or favorite a page to ever find it again.

The product is pretty easy to use, have a great UI. The simplicity of the features are a blessing for all users. Its has made document sharing so easy that anyone can use it without any training.Also, the seamless integration with JIRA and other widgets eases our power to use the tool at the best!

The only thing i dislike is when we edit a document in space or add a new document, its really troublesome to remove it properly.Also, the import and export functionality can be improved.

- Easy to use: Confluence is designed to be easy to use, with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate and quickly find the information you need.- Flexible: Confluence allows you to customize its features to fit your specific needs. You can choose which plugins and add-ons you want to use, and change the design to fit your needs.- Collaboration: Confluence makes it easy for multiple users to collaborate on projects and documents. With its built-in communication and sharing tools, it's easy to keep everyone on the same page.- Security: Confluence is secure and offers a variety of security options to ensure that your data stays safe.

- Price: Confluence is not free, and the cost may be prohibitive for some users.- Complexity: While Confluence is designed to be easy to use, some features can be complex and require some technical know-how.- Limited customization: While Confluence offers some customization options, they are limited compared to other collaboration tools.

Confluence is a comprehensive collaboration and project management tool that offers a range of features designed to make it easier to manage projects, store and share documents and files, and collaborate with team members. Some of the features that users often like the most include its task management capabilities, centralized document storage, file sharing features, and reporting/project tracking tools. Some of the most impactful features in Confluence include its task management capabilities, which allow users to easily assign tasks, set due dates, and track progress; its centralized document storage, which provides a single location for storing and sharing files; its collaboration features, such as comments and mentions, which allow teams to easily discuss and collaborate on content; and its reporting and project tracking tools, which provide a way to monitor and evaluate project progress.

Certain features, such as reporting and project tracking, can be difficult to set up and use. Additionally, the platform can be complex or overwhelming for those who are new to project management or collaboration tools.

The program helps in creating special files and templates and sharing them among all team members to assist in reviewing, evaluating, updating, and adding new ones at any time, which facilitated cooperation between teams, the transfer of documents between them in an easy way, and assistance in creating documents. In addition to that, the program is characterized by the availability of many templates and also helps the team to take notes

There is no obvious and attention-grabbing defect in this program. It has helped me in my work and helped my team members in completing our work in a very easy and time-saving way, but we want the ability to open links in new tabs, but in any case it is much better than others, and I did not find a defect in it that needs to talk a lot about it

As a user there are few points like - Dynamic pages - While working in the big team as a better understanding of project confluence pages are plays an important role as it gives a create/collaborate feature to all team members. Best Security- As it provides at rest encryption as well as at rest also it provides encryption.

While working on this application below are some of my observations - Most of the time observes the delay in the updated confluence pages.Observe the slowness in the application while loading pages/documentation.

- Great tool to store knowledge about anything and everything. It will server as an internal wiki- Great tool to manage projects using timeline visualisations- Great tool for broadcasting information for clients etc like a bulletin.- Great tool for maintaining processes followed within the team/organisation

- The editor feels a little outdated at times- There can be better editing tools- There can be better 3rd patry plugin integrations

Collaboration with numerous tools already in use by our company like Asana, Slack, Miro Board, Google Sheets, etc. ,
Ease of use and sharing documents just by a click, and
Permission handling of users.

Struggle to share snippets of code and adhering to syntax, and
not having a flowchart builder feature.

Confluence has become the defacto wiki tool for most of the companies that I've worked with. The barrier to entry is super simple and VERY easy to setup (either Enterprise deployment or in the Cloud). Either way, most engineers I know these days are very familiar with Confluence.

There are also a ton of plugins and enhanced features that you can bolt onto Confluence which make it robust and scalable.

There are a few things I don't like about Confluence:

1. The search functionality is a bit... wonky (?) to use... they try to load predictive results, which don't open in a new page automatically, it takes too long to load sometimes and if you press 'enter' and don't wait for the predictive results to load it takes you to entirely new page where the results have to load again. Also if you try to search before the JS has fully loaded the search doesn't work, takes your focus away. This means I have to be very slow when using the search feature and it easily frustrates me.

2. They advertise all these awesome plugins and support widgets, which cost a ton of money, but they only apply at the space level, not an individual account level. I'd be more inclined to buy stuff if I could also apply it to my personal Confluence account and take it with me. There are features like enhanced project management, and task management, and charting, and RTF features that I want, but the last two organizations LOCK THIS DOWN and getting a plugin installed is like moving heaven and earth.

3. Im a web dev and an embedded systems engineer. I like to touch things. Confluence can be a bit locked down sometimes and regid in the HTML5 layouts and JS run on page. I wish I could be an 'advanced user' and just make the changes within page. But I cannot. Im stuck with the one size fits all.

All of that said, they are gripes of a dev, but otherwise the wiki space is pretty fantastic. I use it daily!

Confluence is the most useful documentation tool of all time. It allows you to have all your documents in one place and not only that but it organizes them so very well. The number of tools it provides for editing a document is just amazing, something that is missing in all other documentation tools. The customizable templates are very useful too. I love adding images and videos to my documents, arranging the texts in blocks or tables, highlighting the important notes, etc. Confluence lets me do all of this. I also like how it allows collaboration of multiple people and highlights the contributors.

I did not find any cons in the product itself but I would like to see better support service for confluence

-No need to use multiple MS software like Ms Project, excel or even Word for documentation. Now I'm using a single tool for my Checklist, Requirement list, action plans, help guides, and testing strategies.
-I like how it is integrated with JIRA which is also one of the main tools we use at work. All Jira dashboards are available within Confluence which allows documentation to be supported by task.
-There are ready templates for creating different types of documents. There is an option to create hierarchy for documentation and link them to each other to avoid duplication.

-Right now, exporting of documents is only limited to Word and PDF file types. It would be better if there were more options.
-Adding the option to customize forms would be a convenient feature. Instead of only having the pre-build forms.
-It is also better if there will be more complex support for searching algorithms for discovery when searching, not just by typing the exact keyword

Easy to use navigation bar per space (topic area) of store notes coupled with a range of text formatting and style features - Confluence is one of the best software tools available for notes taking! The inbuilt macros, linking page functions, mentions, comments and live editing all add to the allure of the Atlassian product range.

Confluence can be a steep learning curve due to the overwhelming amount of functionality available - including the permissions and access control clashes.

The thing that I like most about Confluence is that I can create linked set articles in order to maintain technical documentation, which can be distributed across a wide range of teams and departments easily using the built-in shared features. The tools make it easy to embed pages within a page in order to create easy to follow guides. The ability to use tables and pictures helps a lot as well, and they're a lot of add-ins that can be used, such as code blocks!

If not set-up well, the organization of a workspace can get out of hand, making articles very hard to find. It is paramount to have a plan when creating pages and documents. There are not a lot of custom formatting options, and as far as I can tell, no way to automatically create a table of contents for a page, which would be a huge benefit.

The widgets. I love the team calendars, the roadmap functionality for time lines, decision tracking and criteria, tasks/action items and the ease of defining them, status bars, and the flexibility for meeting notes, how to articles, blogs, file lists, product requirements, retrospectives, task reports, and troubleshooting articles from one source. It has really improved our interaction with customers for projects and documentation.

From time to time I see issues with editing pages. It does not make the bold or color changes to changes even though the toolbar indicates it is made, it does not display correctly. I also see this display issue with tasks, where the tool bar indicates a task is inserted, but it is not displaying correctly. And also see this issue with bullets. It will display no bullet, or even worse, it displays additional bullets that I don't want.

I would also love to be able to sync widgets between pages (ie a status bar on one page to a parent of that page for a summary. And also be able to sync components/pieces of a page between two Confluence instances. For an example of the use case, we have a time line that we maintain on an internal instance, and I want to sync parts of that timeline to an external instance that we share with customers. This would allow me to have internal only deliverables mapped, but provide a customer facing doc without maintaining two versions

It is extremely easy to create a large number of documents, it is possible to reference other documents within them to facilitate ease of research, and documents can all be put into sub-folders to contain them within separate trees to aid with organisation.
The mobile app is extremely useful for reading documentation whilst on the go - an example would be that we keep Video Conference details on one page that I have favorited, as such when I set up a VC from any location I am able to rapidly find the correct details to dial.
The search functionality allows for extremely quick location of relevant documents. On many occasions I have not been able to find what I need looking through the lists, only to immediately find it on the first search. Indeed I no longer look through the list as the search is so efficient.
When changes are made to documents it is possible to set it up to notify other members of the team so that they are able to see what has been done.

The only minor issue I have discovered with confluence is that when creating new documents setting the location is not as smooth as I would like.
Specifically I need to begin creating the document, then select "Move" and finally put it into the desired place. This does not really cause issues as it is still a quick process, however a one click setup would be appreciated.

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.

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.

Since we work remotely, confluence is the main repository for our documents (I belong to the People & Ops team and we have a lot of policies and processes documents to maintain).

Here is what I like the most about confluence:

1. I feel its a perfect combination of a word and a presentation file; you can be as creative as you want with your content with no length limit (like in a presentation file)
2. I absolutely love how we can create sections within the document - makes the whole document look absolutely organized
3. We also can create indexes like in books so it's very convenient to find any particular topic that we are looking for
4. Easy to create and share any document
5. If you are collaborating with multiple people on a document, it's very easy to assign a certain task to them using the tagging and action item feature
6. You get amazing options to complete your document - layouts, table, heading, alignment of text/images, emoji
7. Also if you have not tried the insert function yet, you are missing out a whole deal there - with so many options to choose from, this makes the document very very interactive

All the features in confluence are great. However, since I am also a user of the google sheet and word, the only pinch I feel - and this is about every time I use Confluence - is the lack of font to choose from.

The default font is good as it makes the whole document look very professional. But for documents where we actually want to add more fun, I believe, we would definitely need more fonts :)

Confluence is a great option for existing Atlassian users looking to seamless integrate an active knowledge base into their project workflow. With direct connection to the JIRA project management platform, Confluence allows you to connect existing users directly to relevant project documentation. Its base functionality is fairly intuitive for novice users, and its advances permissions schemes allow you to create a variety of admin tiers that can restrict access to relevant users only. The integration between Confluence and JIRA is as simple as checking a box in the user admin panel.

As a general word processor, Confluence can be a little clunky when compared to the UX of similar processors such as Word of Google Docs. While its advanced features can be very useful for more experienced users, available tutorials can be difficult to come by and are often outdated. Like most Atlassian products, the bounty of features, settings, and schemes can be very overwhelming to the average user and are not overtly intuitive. Document organization can also be very confusing, as there are a variety of options to choose from when creating parent and child pages.

A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plan to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location.
The confluence editor feature makes it easier for me to create documents, review and share feedback and changes can be tracked thru page histories.
Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users to navigate between pages and information.
It is easy to build links within pages by adding an anchor. You don't need to remember which part of the page you have read a certain information and do page scroll.
I like the gliffy plugin. Whenever I need to embed a workflow diagram, adding gliffy makes it easier to attach flowchart, it's dynamic as changes in the diagram is reflected in the page.
I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them
Documenting a test report is easier with the JIRA integration - JIRA issues highlighted and linked and JIRA issue filters can be embedded and since these two (JIRA and Confluence) work hand in hand, it makes delivering software in agile approach a lot easier.

To beautify your confluence page, you need to know which macros and plugins you need to add but by doing these, one needs to have very basic knowledge in html or programming which could be a learning curve to most people. But lots of how to videos are shared by Atlassian and lots of documented procedures are out there shared by experienced users. One just need to be resourceful. The challenges in embedding spreadsheet with macros and formatting tables are not a challenge anymore if you know what macro or plugin to use.

Another issue is sometimes finding the information you are seeking is not successful and sometimes the information search for spans to multiple pages - but information actually can be managed by adding labels which again boils down to the user having the knowledge that this feature exists.

- Lots of visual tools for organizing information, as well as molding communications: gliffy diagrams, code blocks, cells, spreadsheets.
- Permissions model for segmenting information is greatly useful for organizations that create lots of documents and require some controls on searching and access to documents based on role.
- Web-based interface for administrators of Confluence is convenient for managing content, delegation and authorization work.
- There are many free software solutions in this sector of software, but generally require significant development to provide the value and features offered by confluence out of the box.
- Development and improvements continue to be deployed, Confluence has not been static
- Add-ons available through Atlassian marketplace to allow for further feature-adds for organization needs. I work in an IT environment, and diagrams for networks, software, process flows are invaluable for documentation purposes.
- Shortcut commands for savvy power users saves lots of time inserting tools and setting up formatting with ease, once you are aware them.

- Having used confluence for over 6 years, I have seen Confluence become more reliable with every update. At times, when something would go wrong with text formatting (bullet point indentation, for example), a power user could go to a tab of the document page you were working on, and edit the markup language of the page to correct the quirky formatting issue. This feature was removed. To the credit of Confluence, fixing such issues is less and less necessary, but power users like myself still miss it.
- The permissions models can be confusing at times, even for highly technical people supporting the software. I do not think this is an issue with Confluence, but rather, a caution to administrators who approach permissions from different eco-systems.

Being an Atlassian product it is fully compatible with the rest of the suite, and being used together with Jira and Bitbucket is a real hit.
It allows to link a Jira task/bug/story/whatever by just writing the element reference number; it will automatically create a link to the real stuff on Jira. This makes easy to keep work briefs about epics and stories, so you can easily talk about when or where you fixed something, and just link the task in which you logged the work.
Besides that is really flexible allowing to have multiple sub-level pages to properly organize the information in a much more structured way than a Wiki. This allows to keep software documentation, teams structure and oranization, meetings briefs, and so on in the same application but in a well structured and easy to use way.
Regarding the usability, the text editor is quite complete, and allows to create very neat pages really fast. It supports images, tables, formatted text... everything you would need in a documentation app, is there.

For this software I have not found any serious cons... maybe something I would like to be changed is the placement of the save button. On that location I use to miss it and sometimes I just closed the page without saving because I forgot the button was there; but that is just my problem remembering things.

As a remote worker, I've had the pleasure of using Confluence for several months now, and it has quickly become a key part of my daily workflow. One of the things I like most about Confluence is its ability to facilitate collaboration among team members, regardless of location or time zone. The app allows us to create, share, and edit documents and knowledge bases in real-time, providing a central hub for all of our team's information.I also appreciate the app's flexibility, as it allows us to create and organize content in a variety of formats, from plain text to multimedia-rich pages with embedded videos and images. The app's intuitive editor makes it easy to add headings, lists, tables, and other formatting elements, and the powerful search functionality makes it easy to quickly locate and access any piece of information.Confluence's integration with other popular productivity tools such as Jira, Trello, and Slack is another great feature, which allows us to easily link to and reference relevant tasks, issues, and messages. Plus, the app's access controls and permissions management make it easy to control who has access to what information, providing a level of security that is crucial for our business.

One area where I think Confluence could improve is in its interface, which can feel a bit overwhelming at first. However, once you get the hang of the app's navigation and layout, it quickly becomes second nature.