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.

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.

As a user of Confluence, I can confidently say that what I like the most about this collaboration tool is its ability to bring teams together and streamline their work. With Confluence, it is easy to create, share, and collaborate on content in real-time, regardless of where team members are located.One of the key features of Confluence is its flexibility, allowing users to create pages in a variety of formats, including text, images, videos, and more. This makes it easy to create and share content with team members, and to ensure that everyone is working from the same page. The software also supports real-time editing, which means that multiple team members can work on the same document at the same time, making collaboration more efficient and effective.Another feature that I appreciate is the ability to integrate with other tools and software, such as JIRA and Trello, which makes it easy to bring together different aspects of a project and keep everything organized. The software is also highly customizable, with a range of themes and plugins available to tailor the platform to specific needs.

One common criticism is that the platform can be a bit overwhelming, particularly for new users who are not familiar with the software. Some users have reported that the sheer number of features and customization options can be difficult to navigate, and it can take some time to get up to speed with all of the functionality.

I like the programs arrangement to do track tasks.

The lack of customer support and cost of the program.

Confluence is an excellent collaboration tool that allows users to create, share and collaborate on various projects. The platform is incredibly user-friendly and easy to use, with a wide array of features that allow for seamless collaboration. The user interface is intuitive and clean, making it easy to navigate and find the features you need.

The only downside to Confluence is that it can be a bit pricey for some users. Additionally, it is not as intuitive or feature-rich as some of its competitors.

Our communication and document sharing has become much faster and more effective thanks to Confluence's collaboration features. It is simple for team members to add comments, mentions, and attachments within pages, making it easy for everyone to stay informed. It gives our team's knowledge base a neat and organized platform to be stored on. The software's features, such as page templates, labels, and hierarchy structures, enable us to build a well-organized and searchable information repository. It integrates without a hitch with the other tools in our tech stack, making it an incredibly useful and practical tool for us to use. All things considered, Confluence has been a great asset to our team.

It can be cluttered and difficult to navigate, making it challenging to find specific information and files. It can be slow and unresponsive at times, causing frustration and slowing down our workflow. Another issue is the limited customization options, which can make it difficult to fully integrate the software into our specific needs and processes. And the pricing for additional features and upgrades can become quite expensive, making it difficult to budget for and utilize the full range of capabilities offered by the platform.

I appreciated the convenience of collaborating with my team using Confluence. Its user-friendly design made it simple to make and manage documents, exchange concepts, and collaborate with other colleagues. By using Confluence, I was able to bring my team together quickly and easily to debate projects and plans. Furthermore, I was pleased with the option to personalize the atmosphere of the workspace, allowing us to make it reflective of our team.

I don't have any dislikes in regards with the Confluence application.

What I like the most is that you can integrate confluence with Jira. A task management tool and a documentation tool, both very solid, together but separated. This is awesome, as you can have different people focusing on different solutions without interfeering.

I really have nothing to compare it with. You could compare Confluence with Notion, but the way Confluence and Jira integrate makes it uncomparable.

The best thing about confluence is that it comes under the Atlassian software ecosystem and it is packed with features that help to make use of it easy and effective.

Nothing at the moment because it is suitable for my use case.

I particularly appreciate the flexibility of Confluence. It allows you to create collaborative spaces for different projects, teams or domains, using predefined or customized templates. The search function is also very powerful, making it easy to find specific content. In addition, I really like the ability to add macros to integrate external tools, such as dashboards or diagrams.

I find that Confluence can be a little difficult to get used to for new users. Creating custom templates or macros can take some time and patience. Also, software updates can sometimes cause compatibility issues with certain macros or plugins.

The best feature that this has is the extended Add-In marketplace. You can find the proper Add-In to express your ideas in the best way: Coding, Images or illustrations, animated gifs or videos, and even forms inside the documents and pages. From a user perspective, this is one on the easiest knowledge base software in the market, and also you have the bakcing of Atlassian. The process of the integration with our existing business logic was easy because we didn't have a strict knowledge base, but Confluence gave us the foundations to build one from scratch.

The export tools and options you have inside the platform are not good. The data isn't portable, so you can't migrate easily to another platform in case you want. The installation process was complex, but today, they stopped producing self-hosted applications, so you are obligated to use their cloud services, and it can be a problem if the company has a strict data policy, like restrictions in the phisycal storage of the data.

Easy to use and high integration level with other Atlassian tools is the most interesting part of Confluence. There are more powerful software out there, but none of them has this integration level in a full bundle that Atlassian offers.

Managing tables (with a huge amount of data) is not easy here, so usually, we prefer to attach excel files, but if it was more powerful in managing sheets, definitely we like it more!

-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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

The best thing about Confluence is the Integration with other Atlassian tools, especially Jira, and if you are using both at the same time it helps to pull data automatically in the service desk and suggest articles and information or log tickets. It's fairly simple to build out pages that are very basic but going further in depth or building something more complicated takes some time. It's not 100% intuitive.

It doesn't integrate with anything else which is an issue because it's not ideal that within every organization you'd be using all Atlassian tools. Building out pages is complicated and not intuitive, it takes some practice. Notion offers more ease and option here.

I think the tool is really easy for engineers to use especially as they are used to using Jira or Atlassian, but business folks struggle. I might also argue that the search functionality is too good - which is an odd complaint but it can be hard to sort through all of the hits that you get when you are looking for something specific.