Confluence Reviews

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

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

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.

Confluence, especially the new cloud version, is one of the best tools to use for documenting your knowledge-base. The best parts for me are:

- The ability to connect my articles with to-do tasks from project management (Jira from Atlassian, same company, so they work like a charm together).
- The articles I can contain any media types, from spreadsheets that I can edit in-line to videos. There are also a lot of native panels to help anybody create very stylish articles with usability.
- In-line and footer comment sections help my team discuss and develop documents all together, without losing any of the discussion history.
- The ability to also keep an internal blog. I use that to inform my colleagues for the day-to-day developments, and keep everybody on track with high ideas and management efforts.
- All of the above can be also used as a customer-facing knowledge-base, to serve your customers with documents, operation manuals and help articles. Very handy if you use it together with the service desk solution from the same company, but can also be used stand-alone too.

In general it's one of the best choices that I made when I was searching for a documentation solution for my company and my clients, back in 2010. Almost a decade passed and Confluence is still growing better and better by the time. Atlassian the company behind Confluence is now huge and offers many solutions that integrate with Confluence, making it an even better choice if you use other tools from them.

I can't find any cons to Confluence. After all there is no perfect solution, only elegant ones depending on the problem one tries to solve.

Atlassian is offering a trial period so anybody can see if Confluence is good for their company's documentation needs.

From my experience, it would be bad to start a trial before you hove some really motivated people in your team and some content to put in there. Because it would be better to test Confluence with something that you would use in your company, so that you see first hand the pros and cons while your team works with Confluence with material that is close to the true material that you would put in there.

If I was to change one thing it would be the way it recognizes internally any of the pages I create, so that Confluence doesn't have any issues with pages with same titles. That would be a nice time saver and space saver in the outline of any wiki one creates.

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!

Confluence is very user friendly so no need to spend time and money on employee training and learning.
It is time saving tool in agile project lifecycle reducing heavy documentation and support.
Better customer support compared to other vendors and softwares.
Cost effective and resilient for Risk management and project planning activities.

Build deployment sometimes take time and version controlling mechanism require better practice for stability

Confluence is a great tool for having all your documentation and knowledge in one place. You can create wiki pages for each topic and group these pages under 'Spaces'. Multiple team members can work on one page simultaneously. It captures a detailed audit trail on the changes made at a page level. You can have strong control on the content publishing by defining a robust review and approval process. It has a robust search functionality and it seamlessly integrates with JIRA, MS Teams and other third party tools.

One major issue with Confluence is that when multiple people are working on one page simultaneously, then you need to refresh the page in order to see the changes made by others. Also, the access control can be complex and glitchy sometimes.I would love if the user interface for Confluence is improved.

Excellent program for group work and information exchange. It comes with more than a hundred different layouts to choose from. Access controls are provided, and team members can easily connect with one another. It's an excellent resource for building and managing a database of how-to guides to be distributed to clients. It's also great because it works in tandem with other attlassian applications, such as JIRA.

Unless one is familiar with the relevant duties, I find the administrative side to be a bit of a hassle. Limitations in personalization and usability in document format selection make it difficult to create documents in specific ways.

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.

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.

I use Confluence as a customer service employee. We have a vast amount of procedures for managing internal systems, as well as for applying systems to actual contact with customers. All of these procedures are stored and maintained in Confluence.

What helps me the most, is Confluence's super-advanced search functionality. Essentially, I merely have to type in a relevant word, and Confluence will list all the applicable articles. This allows me to find a relevant procedure for a specific situation in seconds.

Another important feature to me is the commenting system. I collaborate with users who create and manage articles. When I see info in an article that's outdated or incorrect, I can leave a comment, and the article manager will get a notification. It's easy to collaborate in this way and keep information up-to-date.

Lastly, the permission schemes help with keeping editing (or even viewing rights) limited to the relevant users. Within customer service this is important, as there are varying levels of authorization within our organisation.

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

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.

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 an enterprise-grade collaboration and knowledge management tool developed by Atlassian. It is a web-based platform that enables teams to work together seamlessly, share information, and create and store content in a centralized location.One of the most significant advantages of Confluence is its versatility. It can be used by different teams in various industries, including software development, marketing, project management, human resources, and customer support. The platform provides teams with a range of features to create, share, and organize content, including pages, blogs, comments, templates, and macros.One of the key benefits of Confluence is its intuitive user interface, making it easy to use and learn. It has a WYSIWYG editor that enables teams to create rich content with ease, and the platform is highly customizable, allowing teams to tailor it to their specific needs.Confluence also integrates with various other Atlassian tools, including Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket, which allows for seamless collaboration across different teams and departments. The platform also offers various add-ons and integrations with third-party tools, further expanding its functionality..

However, like any software, Confluence has its drawbacks. The platform can be slow at times, and its pricing may not be affordable for small businesses or startups. Additionally, while Confluence's search functionality is powerful, it can be challenging to navigate, making it difficult to find specific content.

Atlassian has created a really well-designed solution that allows teams to share information in a single workspace. The user interface is simple to use not only for users but also for administrators; the program is simple to use and versatile for users. Templates allow you to write papers more faster, exchange comments, track progress, establish deadlines, and manage files smoothly. Confluence is highly beneficial for maintaining notes and modules for a very specific environment, and it is the most secure way to get the rights required to acquire that correct document, as well as the easiest way to manage the work accordingly and quickly share.

Confluence, in my opinion, needs a better way to search, and it has recently become a little slower for regular usage. When we try to move to other Confluence-like systems, it takes a long time to export our files, regardless of whether we use HTML/PDF or XML, thus if this improves, consumers will benefit greatly. Confluence may be sluggish and complicated when switching between pages and contexts; it would be preferable to have some type of option to make it easier to use and comprehend.

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!)