Confluence Reviews

It is very useful to share all our documentation and knowledge base. All the users are now able to get updated information, and can share any documentation with the team.

It can become a bit slow sometimes, causing the pages to take longer to load and look for information.

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features can be very useful for more experienced users, available tutorials can be difficult to come by and are often outdated.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.

What I like the most about Confluence is the integration with Jira, the flexibility of creating your own department space, and managing the permissions. We use it for a large knowledgebase. Having the in-line comments helps identify issues with a document and can be shared and modified by the correct knowledge expert. The history feature is nice if you want to compare document versions. This is like a wiki on steroids.

The plug-ins needed to be a great product. It is expensive to run. User management is poor and difficult to maintain since this is a license-per-user software (Cloud version). I think the comments on each page are overused, which greatly slows the page loading. Task management is clunky and not recommended. Many features and fixes requested on the Atlassian site still have had no movement or comments from developers for years. Every solution is a hack or a plugin, which adds more cost to the service.

Curating processes to fit the way we do business and organizing an easy access database to allow employees to utilize tools, or knowledge points it's crucial. Confluence allows you to easily create and navigate sources necessary to run a business.

The formatting limitations on some of the pages. While they offer a lot of layout options ultimately creating expanding boxes is not easy or user friendly. There may be a way to do it a lot of the time but it's not always obvious, as it should be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The software is very easy to use for its most basic features - as a place to create and store content. It is a solid tool for a knowledge base or even project management. Macros allow creatively in how content is displayed and linked or mirrored from other pages. Users can control permissions, visibility and see a clear history of changes - which can be easily reverted back to if necessary. Page trees make it simple to navigate complex "spaces" of information and the search functionality is robust. Overall, a great place to develop content for internal collaboration and future reference.

Although Confluence is a great place to create and collaborate on content, it has a few major downfalls that are a constant source of frustration. The biggest issue relates to users working on the same page at the same time. This is a horrible experience at best. Content between users is frequently lost or overwritten and you can never be confident in if your content will save successfully and not disappear. When Confluence tries to merge changes, it often will lose content or simply not work at all. The result is users ensuring that only one person is editing at a time, which is a terrible annoyance and slows teams down. It often causes teams to actively collaborate in another tool where this is not an issue and then simply link to it through Confluence.

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).

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.

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 :)

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

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.

Confluence offers pretty good UI for creating excellent documents (requirements or design). It does support pretty much all features of Microsoft word for creating a great documentation. Between all Atlasssian products, if you are tight on budget, I would suggest you to get Jira and confluence combo. It’s indeed great tool combo for the remote agile teams to work together due to their seamless integration.

One thing that I loved on the share point that’s not great with confluence is integration with the Microsoft office products. To be very frank, I feel this is not a big drawback as now a days, web interface is pretty much replacing the traditional interface.

It comes with rich features, below are a few features which I personally liked:

1. Documentation: When there are some important knowledge articles that need to be shared with the team, we use this tool. It comes with multiple options to make the page feels catchy and rich, it also allows us to attach the images.

2. Search Functionality: When there are 1000s of confluence pages, and if I want to access the page containing a specific word or a line, the search engine works like a champ it finds the pages almost immediately, this feature really helps me in easing my office work.

3. It displays the name of the person who had created the page and last modified person name, this helps to know whom to reach out to when we need additional info pertaining to the details as written on the page. And if required we can add the approvals, thus whenever someone edits the document without your consent changes won't reflect others until you approve the updates.

4. Like and Comments: Similar to social media, readers can either hit like if they like the content or they can mention their feedback in the comment section, this feature really helped me while suggesting something to the author or express my thanks via a LIKE.

There should've been an option to keep the page in draft before publishing it. But unfortunately, there is no such feature in confluence.
Apart from this, I didn't find any other flaws in the software.

Confluence is great for creating company manuals or documenting company procedures. Think of it as a formal business blog or a wiki where you can keep a record of anything from basic tables outlining company info to company policies which can then be shared with the rest of the employees so that they can in turn, learn and input their own observations and knowledge. It organizes the pages for you and it makes it easy for anyone to search, edit and add new pages to keep the knowledge growing. At my company, we use it as a manual and all new employees have to read through it as part of their training. It allows you to add photos or videos to document special past events or to just simply make the page more interesting. The formatting ribbon looks similar to Microsoft word's so if you have experience with using a Word document then it should be no problem using the different types of formating options and if you have no experience then you'll get the hang of it pretty soon as it's fairly easy to deduce what each button does. I love how it is able to save any edits you make to a page and it doesn't publish it until you are ready so you are able to make new pages and edit old ones at your own pace and once you are done you can click on "publish". It alows you to restrict what other people can and cannot edit, it sends notifications to those who have a user in your account. I would recommend it.

The interface could use more color or some pizzazz as it looks pretty dull and it reminds me of an electric appliance manual: gray and boring to the point that you feel like throwing it away but then you are too afraid to do so because you may never know when you might need it. But then again, I use it as a company manual so I can't do much there, I'm guessing if you want something prettier then go get a blogging account but Confluence gets straight to the point and it should be taken seriously.

With Confluence we have an environment that is very efficient to work in to add new content, very easy to update articles and manage file attachments. The keyboard shortcuts are second to none. It is an absolute pleasure to work in Confluence all day. Setting up spaces for various audiences, including a "personal space" allows me to draft documents privately and then move the document over into a space with an audience. Effectively I can "publish" content to employees with a couple of mouse clicks.

Permissions are very well thought out. The permission scheme is based on spaces, individuals and groups, with flexibility from super-locked-down to wide open on the public internet. It allows control of various actions per person or per group, and affords us maximum utility of the product. People within the business are dreaming up different ways to use it faster than we can implement them.

As with any full-featured system that allows you total control as an administrator, successful use of the product requires that you lay out your business requirements clearly first so that there are no unexpected outcomes. Establishing best practices for content creators within the system is also advisable.

I have used other systems in the past, notably MediaWiki and SharePoint, and while I enjoyed them at the time, Confluence blows everything else out of the water. The control and flexibility is unparalleled and the product has obviously been designed for use in environments where project priorities, staff hierarchies, etc can experience rapid significant change.

I also highly recommend the Atlassian sister product JIRA and add-on JIRA Service Desk for task based work management. It is incredibly useful.

With great power comes great responsibility and great potential to make an absolute mess of things. Deployment of this tool to a large user base would require some serious preparation to establish access schemes, permissions for user groups, best practices for editing and creating new content, and organizing content within the spaces. End user training is critical to cement those rules and establish a culture around using it effectively. I would not recommend deploying this tool in a slapdash hurry (Although, given it's innate flexibility, it would be easier to correct it later with Confluence than some of its competitors!)