Confluence

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!

It's a great content management/Wiki tool for collaboration and knowledge base creation. It has many integrations available out of the box, especially Atlassian products. Once you understand how it works for authors, many powerful features are available. I really like the tree structure that lets you nest topics. This makes organization easy to create and locate relevant information quickly by skipping directly to the info.

It can be daunting to get the hang of how things work as a new user. The user interface is simple, but some of the more powerful features require a bit of research and playing around to understand.

We also frequently run into permission issues and user syncing with our IDP. We have tickets open with the vendor that took a long time to be acknowledged as bugs and after months, they are still not fixed.