Confluence Reviews

The Collaboration Platform You've Waited For

Comments: We document everything in Confluence. I run a digital marketing team of around 20 people and have a total of 40 users in the tool (a few other teams besides mine use it). It's been a fantastic tool to get everyone on the same page and keep track of our how-tos, meeting notes, plans, goals, features/specs, etc.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Confluence is quite inexpensive for what you get and it's super powerful. I really love the quick, accurate search results. The macro functionality and new "Slack" style slash commands are really cool. The notification system is very nice, especially the @mentions.

A superior collaborative workspace

Comments: The platform is accessible to anyone and has an open interface, letting our company set up collaborative spaces where staff can collaborate productively on a wide range of projects. It's reliable, and it made it easy to increase our property holdings. It may not be necessary to invest time and resources into teaching employees how to use Confluence because it may be extremely user-friendly.

Pros:

Confluence's suite of team communication tools is crucial to any effort to increase output. It's a lot dependable and much cheaper than other options. It's essential equipment for anyone seeking total control over their team's overall performance.

Cons:

It's a steep learning curve for our less tech-savvy customers to become proficient at working on our websites. The fact that the support staff is exclusively fluent in English may also be an inconvenience for some consumers. Integration with Azure DevOps is a little bit of a challenge.

User review

Comments: Confluence is a powerful tool that can enhance team collaboration and project management.

Pros:

Excellent for creating, organizing, and sharing documentation within teams. Helps to serve as a single source of the information project. Helps with collaboration features, editing, adding comments, and notifications, which improves the communication of the team. Provides templates for several types of documents, makes it easier to get started. It easy integrates with other Atlassian products (like Jira). Very user-friendly interface make it accessible for users of all technical levels.

Cons:

using the documents is easy, but navigating within it requires a training, and might take some time to get use to it. The paid plans can be expensive, for big teams

Would not recommend to use it in the SaaS version

Comments: It is working most of the time, with several outages in the past months.
We were forced to migrate from the on-prem to the SaaS version. The on-prem version was very good, the SaaS software is a mess in terms of ensuring information security and has way worse usability.

Pros:

Concurrent editing is still possible in the SaaS version.

Cons:

Has advertisements for other products in the menu. You have no sufficient control over the 3rd party features the users can see and use. It's a nightmare to document its use according to GDPR rules.

Confluence is a very famous product for project management.

Comments: If you're new to it, you need to adapt. You also have a reluctance to tools that you haven't used before. But for effective projects and business management, you now have to use collaborative tools. You can get a better work environment by adapting quickly to the initial inconvenience.

Pros:

Project management, output, work-specific human resources management, sharing and collaboration with all participants are important, and Confluence solves all these things at once. There are many services and solutions for efficient project management, but we always use Confluence.

Cons:

Perhaps because it is mainly used for necessary functions, there are no disadvantages yet.

A great tool for keep corporate documentation

Comments: All the documentation is in a single system available for all our employees.
We can search for any information required at any time.

Pros:

We use Atalassian Confluence as our documentation tool / WIKI We like to had all the information in a single source that is searchable and easy to access.

Cons:

The Migration process from On premises Confluence to Cloud confluence was complicated and must be more easy. Apart of that I can't fine something else to complain.

Strong Collaboration Platform with Some Usability Challenges

Comments: It’s an effective tool for centralizing documentation and facilitating collaboration across teams. I’ve found it particularly useful for creating and maintaining project documents.

Pros:

What I liked most about Confluence was its ability to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams.

Cons:

What I liked least about Confluence was that it could sometimes feel a bit clunky, especially when dealing with complex formatting.

One of the best documentation tools

Comments: I never complained about Confluence, it always meet the expectations

Pros:

If you are a member of a company Confluence is a great tool for documentation, you can do almost everything with it and also it has a integration with Jira

Cons:

If you dont use the atlassian suite, you will probably not use Confluence and is not cheap

Confluence does it ALL

Comments: Overall we have been using confluence for a long time now and is instrumental in our teams collaboration.

Pros:

Confluence is great for our team to work together on documentation and centralize its storage as well.

Cons:

Can become quite slow when a lot of information and images are in a central document

Wikipedia for the Internal Company

Comments: Overall, it's good, it's like the wikipedia for your company.

Pros:

It's pretty great! It's got everything you need and is essential for onboarding/transferring knowledge.

Cons:

the search function is not very intuitive

Finest Documentation platform

Comments: Confluence gave better documentation compared tot he old text files so that more readable format. The integration of images and diagrams make the documentation more user friendly.

Pros:

Confluence gives best documentation platform for your projects. We can categorize based on different projects and sub projects. we can create links to another pages which is very useful to route to another document without searching for it. we can see all the documents related one project in one section. It gives you wide range of features to include images and diagrams to make the documentation more useful. We can also subscribe to the pages so that anyone make any changes we get notified.

Cons:

Confluence needs more integration with the CICD tools available in the market to make more automated documentation. confluence needs to provide to create diagrams for documentation so that users dont need to go for external software for that.

Alternatives Considered: Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: In confluence I can categorize based on projects and sub projects and I can see all the documents for that project and select based on the priorities. But in google docs we need to we need to keep a separate index for each documents and the docs are separate. we need to browse through the google docs to go to next one.

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.

So far, it is the best tool for teamwork

Comments: With the help of confluence, we're able to work together on our project even though our team members are located all over the world and come from a wide range of backgrounds. As a result, all of the project's information may be stored in a single location, making it convenient for everyone involved. This is a huge time-saver.

Pros:

Confluence provides a safe method for sharing knowledge and working on projects among team members. The main business, Atlassian, provides a wide range of reliable plugins. Because everyone on the team can make changes to the document repository and see when and who made them, this is one of the finest features of confluence's document sharing and management system.

Cons:

Many plugins are available, and it might be difficult to pick the ideal one for our purposes. This takes up a lot of time. The guidelines are typically adequate.

Great product for a Small / Medium Bussiness

Comments: My experience using Confluence is great, we stopped having several places to store the same information or share results, now we share everything in one place.

Pros:

Allows to have one single place for all the company's documentation, this reduces efforts and allow an easy more controlled data sharing. We have very interesting possibilities with other collaboration tools. It is very easy to use, just type, tag and share. Just like using any social network.

Cons:

Even though this is a very easy to use tool, sometimes the navigation is not so easy to understand. Users cannot see edits in a document in real time like Docs in Google Drive. Lastly, some formatting options are quite basic, a little or more options would be appreciated.

Alternatives Considered: Kipwise

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Confluence has better integrations with other tools.

Switched From: Kipwise and Nuclino

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Because the relation quality - price in confluence was greater.

Our knowledge base

Comments: We were having problems to share information, and some users were not getting the right information. Knowing that we have a tool for information sharing like Confluence, we create a plan to start documenting all our processes, and now they are available across the company.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: We were looking for a better documentation and information sharing tool

Switched From: Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneNote

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: It was the better option for our company, thinking on how robust is the tool.

The Ultimate Knowledge Hub for Seamless Idea Management and Unbeatable Collaboration

Comments: Our whole team are happy users of Confluence, as the tool has been a positive and beneficial productivity tool for our team.

Pros:

Using Confluence you really appreciate its user-friendly interface, powerful collaboration tools and robust knowledge base management functionalities. Confluence empowered us to easily create, organize and share content with our entire team, making it our go-to solution for efficient idea management, knowledge sharing and alignment between current and future team members. Most importantely, the ability to integrate with our other tools and serbices made it seamless for keeping knowledge synced and shared across the team.

Cons:

With so many great features it can be quite overwhelming for our junior and newer team members to onboard as the learning curve is quite steep.

Alternatives Considered: YouTrack, monday.com, ClickUp, Notion, and Evernote Teams

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Speed, value for money and integrations with Jira.

Switched From: YouTrack and ClickUp

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: The loading speed of documents, tickets and content, value for money and integrations with Jira.

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.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Notion

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: The requirement for a complete collaboration platform motivated our decision to use Confluence. We previously relied on disparate documentation tools, which hampered effective communication and information retrieval. Confluence's organized content foundation made this process more accessible, and its interaction with the products we already use made the transfer smooth and productive.

Switched From: Basecamp

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Confluence was chosen because of its capacity to improve cooperation and knowledge exchange. We were able to develop extensive documentation and resources using the structured content strategy, which aided in the seamless execution of the project. Furthermore, the platform's integration features ensure that our work ecology remains coherent, avoiding data silos and increasing overall efficiency.

It should be taken seriously

Comments: As I mentioned before, I use it as a company wide manual where all employees have to leaf through it whenever they have a question on a certain procedure and if they have any changes they'd like to make to any old methods then they are encouraged to make the edits to keep the company knowledge up to speed.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

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.

Wiki Engine on Steroids

Comments: We are using Confluence as our internal documentation storage system. It allows us to easily create documentation and share it among our various teams while controlling access to the teams. It is better than a document storage system for this purpose, as it allows us to create the documents on the fly, cutting a step out of the process and making documents easier to manage. We host it on site, so it is more secure than a solution like Google Docs as it's not on the web.

Pros:

We use Confluence on a daily basis to document various aspects of our organization. There is a large variety of built-in templates for a variety of sorts of documents. We heavily utilize the how-to articles to record procedures. Although it does link with other Altassian products, like Jira, we don't use that functionality currently as we run Confluence on-site and Jira in the cloud. The upgrade to version 6 greatly increased the usefulness of the product, as it brought in concurrent editing, ala Google Docs, which was functionality we needed when developing procedures for an event as a group. The search and indexing capabilities make it easy to find a document if its location is not obvious.

Cons:

Search and indexing can lose usefulness in the event you have many similar documents, like say a checklist that is executed often. I would like a function to be able to click a check box to "ignore results like this." The initial setup of Confluence was not completely straightforward, however, we were installing on an older version, version 5. (The upgrade to version 6 went much smoother.) I would prefer an omnibus install package if it doesn't currently have that rather than having to install PostgreSQL and the application. The LDAP integration could have been a little bit smoother than it was, although it is in line with the other Atlassian products I have integrated.

I highly recommend this product for all corporate companies.

Comments: Overall I'm very happy with this product, without confluence it's impossible to maintain the knowledge article in our team.
It helps everyone across the team. Thanks to the confluence team for such a wonderful product.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Wouldn't recommend at the moment, but things may quickly change.

Comments: It was good. Not it is just too big and heavy even for a big companies.
May be the root of this impression is that Confluence doesn't feel as a seamless system. May be this is because there a different application for different tasks and while this is exactly what you expect using a tool per task, this is somehow plays against Confluence.
On the bright side, this is a part of a bigger ecosystem, it is reliable, it has nice support, it is constantly changes to good.
May be because it is pricy.
Overall, I'd never get back to it, though Jira is still one of the best tools out there.

Pros:

It is somewhat hard to speak about Confluence pros without constantly resorting to integration with other Atlassian products. Confluence was a first haven for a lot of companies and developers, it is safe to say that most of us started their meeting with information systems world with Confluence. It offers some sort if hierarchy for documents, crossreferences, editing. Confluence is offers a number of connectors to other products, and what is of most importance here is that confluence has a set of tools to build statistical data into user-friendly representation. Confluence is a part of Atlassian ecosystem and this is something to keep in mind, because this is the direction developers are pushing you. Confluence may be deployed on premises which is a significant distinction from many other products. It is costly but there is a comprehensive set of documentation, reliable techsupport. Confluence is a handy management tool for it is capable of collecting, digesting and representing a data from various sources. Say, you may render server status page, Jira's taks flow, gantt diagram and all of them will be live. Confluence is quite reliable system and I can not say I can remember a single bug while using it. Mobile and desktop apps for the most platform are there. It has notification, chats, email listings etc.

Cons:

To start with it is pricy. It is slow. The editor is hugely outdated. It pushes you toward other Atlassian products and while the ecosystem itself is not bad, this is not something you'd want these days. Basically, it represents too much of vendor lock and there are a lot of much better substitutions. And the overall design is stuck in 2010. It is heavy, leak, slow. User paths through different usage scenarios could use a hand of able UI designer.

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.

Alternatives Considered: Google Sheets

Switched From: Notion

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: More features and customizability.

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.