Confluence Reviews

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.

Confluence: The Collaboration Tool That Takes Your Team's Productivity to the Next Level

Comments: The platform has helped us improve our project management and meet our deadlines. Confluence integrates seamlessly with other tools, such as Jira and Trello. This integration has saved us much time and effort, as we no longer have to switch between different agencies to manage our projects.

Pros:

Confluence allows teams to virtually connect and collaborate on projects from anywhere in the world. It has benefited my team, as we have members in different parts of the world. We can easily share information, assign tasks, and track progress in real-time. It offers workspaces that allow teams to organize their projects and knowledge in a structured manner.

Cons:

There have been a few instances where the software has been slow to load, but this has not been a significant issue for me.

Alternatives Considered: monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: I chose Confluence because I sought a collaboration tool to help me manage my team's projects more efficiently. I had previously used a different collaboration tool, but it was not meeting my needs. Confluence offered the workspaces, progress tracking, and integration capabilities that I was looking for, and it has exceeded my expectations.

Switched From: Jira

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: It has significantly helped us improve our efficiency and productivity, as we can easily find the information we need and collaborate on specific tasks. Confluence has a powerful progress-tracking system that allows me to track and monitor the progress of my team's projects.

It gets the job done...

Comments: My team uses it as a knowledge base to document engineering processes, research spikes, and to document project roadmaps, to basically keep everyone synced on pretty much everything across engineering and with various stakeholders.

Pros:

So, here's the thing. I feel like Confluence definitely serves a great purpose. I like that it's essentially a one stop shop for finding any documentation needed within my organzation and company.

Cons:

I think the UI and the UX is lacking. While I think my organization keeps things pretty organized in terms of how items are grouped, I think it can come across as things aren't actually organized because the UI makes it seems like everything (documents inside and outside of our organization, all within the same company) is lumped in one place. Additionally, I think the search feature could be better where additional filters could be instituted to ensure you're searching within your own organization's documents versus the entire company. Although, I'm not sure if that's a Confluence thing or the way my company has set it up. Another thing I don't like is the editing and creating documents within Confluence, and again that's a UX thing.

Confluence - A great tool to build your organization wiki

Comments: I would definitely rate confluence 9 on 10 just because of the value it brings to ensure people are on same page without any lag.

Pros:

Overall, Confluence is an excellent choice for teams looking to improve collaboration, communication, and knowledge management. Its intuitive interface, customizable features, and powerful integrations make it a top choice for organizations of all sizes and industries.One area where Confluence really excels is in knowledge management. The platform makes it easy to create and maintain a central repository of information, including company policies, procedures, and best practices. This knowledge base can then be accessed by team members as needed, saving time and ensuring consistency across the organization.

Cons:

While Confluence does offer a mobile app, some users may find the app to be limited in terms of functionality. Improving the app could make it more useful for users who need to access Confluence on the go.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Ease of use to build wiki by all types of users.

Confluence Content/Knowledge base or also a document management system

Comments: Confluence as a documentation tool within the software project environment of Jira is very strong. I haven't seen it independent implemented in other organizations. After this implementation, many organizations start to use it for other purposes as well, due to the ease of use. In my opinion, if the people would spend a little training time a lot of other solutions are a better fit. Unless you use the Jira project suite.

Pros:

The ease to document a wide variety of software related information makes it a strong tool for the teams it has been developed. They also have made it very easy to use several templates for meetings etc. If you integrate it with the main product Jira, then you have a very good combination of tools for software development and follow up documentation.

Cons:

To work properly with confluence you should also use Jira as project management tool. It is hard to implement it without Jira.To make proper documentation a lot of extra plug-ins make your live a lot easier. Some are free, others are at a cost.Integration with office, google workspace etc is hard.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: The documentation and integration with Jira is way better then trying to integrate microsoft sharepoint with Jira. Also the ease of the interface makes it for developers easier to create relations to the project.

Switched From: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Ease of use and integration with Jira.

Confluence: Empowering Collaboration and Mobility for Dynamic Professionals!

Comments: As a long-term user of Confluence, I can confidently attest to the significant positive impact it has had on my professional growth and knowledge management. The platform's comprehensive set of features, including document management, brainstorming, task management, content publishing, and mobile access, have been instrumental in boosting my productivity and facilitating seamless collaboration with diverse teams and organizations. Confluence's ability to streamline workflows, foster knowledge sharing, and provide real-time access to information has greatly contributed to my continuous learning and development. While there is always room for improvement, such as refining the user interface and exploring more flexible pricing options, the overall value that Confluence has brought to my work cannot be overstated. It has become an indispensable tool that has empowered me to effectively manage projects, expand my knowledge base, and consistently achieve successful outcomes.

Pros:

I highly appreciate Confluence as a comprehensive collaboration platform that has greatly facilitated my work as a freelancer managing multiple projects across different teams and organizations. Its features, such as document management, brainstorming, task management, content publishing, and mobile access, have been instrumental in enhancing productivity, knowledge sharing, and effective project coordination. The ability to access Confluence on the go has been particularly valuable in keeping me connected and enabling prompt responses to client and team needs. I am impressed with Confluence's capabilities and how it has simplified my workflow, allowing me to focus on delivering high-quality results in a time-efficient manner.

Cons:

While Confluence offers numerous beneficial features for collaboration and productivity, there are areas where the product could be improved. One aspect that could use enhancement is the user interface, which, although functional, may feel overwhelming and less intuitive for new users. Additionally, the pricing structure of Confluence, especially for freelancers and small teams, can be seen as a drawback. The pricing plans may not be as flexible or affordable for those with limited budgets, making it less accessible for independent professionals. To maintain its competitiveness, Atlassian could consider offering more flexible pricing options tailored to the needs of individual freelancers or smaller teams.

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.

Best Documents Management Tool

Comments: I've found that Confluence offers some great benefits for teams working together. The collaboration features are top-notch, allowing multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. I also appreciate the customization options, which let you tailor the platform to your needs. The document management capabilities are also beneficial, making it easy to organize and find important files. Plus, integrating other tools is seamless, saving you time and effort. Finally, the knowledge management functionality is a nice touch, letting you store and access important information in one place. All in all, Confluence is an excellent tool for team collaboration and productivity.

Pros:

Confluence is an excellent tool for document management. It offers many features, including version control, access controls, and document organization. This makes it much easier to keep track of changes to important documents and manage them effectively. With Confluence, you can be sure that all your documents are stored securely and have complete control over who can access them. Whether you are working on a project or need to keep your records organized, Confluence is the perfect solution.

Cons:

I've heard from some users that Confluence is lacking in some formatting and customization options. Specifically, some have reported that the platform lacks more advanced formatting capabilities, such as the ability to create multi-column layouts. Additionally, while Confluence allows for customization, it seems that the platform's options are somewhat limited compared to other document management tools.

Connected workspace to share project documentation.

Comments: We have centralized shared information approximately the Intersection that the total group has get to to, we utilize it as our centralized shaver, we have real-time network with colleagues, and we share records and data in one central space where everyone can see and respond together with your moment input and any group part can get to shared information and archives based on their parts and get to rights. It has options to form a workspace for the work group and in that specific workspace ready to make different channels and we are able add users (partners) in it and each channel can be doled out with duties and get to parts to share the data with ease. Making substance on this stage is additionally simple sufficient to do to share it with the entire group in one space to urge their sees and make advance with errands.

Pros:

I enjoy how I can get real-time updates on every piece of information and file provided by my coworkers, and it is also convenient to provide comments in the same workspace where my teammate has posted a notice or relevant document. One of the finest features of Confluence is the ease with which we can all manage our papers in a proper format, which we can then share or access throughout the whole business or with any specific team. Simply record anything and upload it once, and it will be easily accessible to everyone. It has some built-in features, such as the ability to create tables that can hold specific information and data in any format.

Cons:

It ought to make strides your searchability, a more exact look result can draw in more clients to it, getting into the beat of conversion needs more time than expected to utilize effectively, but once you know the structure of work, it is lovely simple to utilize this stage for your group workspace, client back is additionally not that accommodating to induce around with a few blogging and web looking.

Confluence

Comments: Confluence is the best product and recommends to purchase.

Pros:

If you need to make a document store or knowledge base, this is the best option, It's really easy to manage the knowledge share and really easy to upload documents to it, Creating documents is super cool and it's like a Word document, you can create docs, can create sub-pages, can insert images, tables, headings, numberings, table of contents, comments, and many more. Not only that you can easily find the documents using a full-text base search tab. Not only that you can directly map a Jira ticket to the doc also.Confluence is really a really cool platform to manage a company-wide knowledge base.

Cons:

Nothing else to say this is the best product we can find in the market

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.

One stop tool for documenting almost anything

Comments: Overall, the feature is a good to have and can make life easy by providing a single stop platform for all the documentation and giving a knowledge hub.

Pros:

Collaboration with numerous tools already in use by our company like Asana, Slack, Miro Board, Google Sheets, etc. , Ease of use and sharing documents just by a click, and Permission handling of users.

Cons:

Struggle to share snippets of code and adhering to syntax, and not having a flowchart builder feature.

Alternatives Considered: Notion

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: To incorporate a range of features that confluence offers and docs don't. Most important being integration with tools and Miro board.

Switched From: Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Confluence has better integrations with other softwares and is a dedicated platform for documentation. Also, we wanted to have a platform where a Knowledge Library can be created and managed easily which confluence gave us.

Best knowledge management and wiki out there

Comments: If you use other Atlassian products, Confluence is the perfect complement. Because exporting documents is so bad, it works best if you, your colleagues and your stakeholders/clients all exist in the same Atlassian ecosystem.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Life saver for software projects

Comments: I have been using confluence every day for the last five years and I love how efficient and easy confluence is to use. It allows you to organize your pages into different spaces according to your needs and has an amazing set of tools for content editing. I remember before we used to store our data in JIRA cards or in MS word everything was just all over the place without any management. Now confluence is our one-stop solution for all our documentation needs. Using confluence we have all our content in one place and well organized

Pros:

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.

Cons:

I did not find any cons in the product itself but I would like to see better support service for confluence

Great documentation platform for both intranets and customer-facing hubs

Comments: The experience I had the last 9-10 years that me and my colleagues worked with Confluence is excellent. The document editor works smoothly even from the mobile app that is offered. There are many article templates to choose from when you start creating an article, from decision making documents to marketing strategy forms and solution focused how-to pages. Confluence supports a lot of media types in the pages, so it's easy to create helpful articles with video, audio, images and many more like attention panels, embedded spreadsheets, etc. You can even embed the contents of one section of a page to another page, so that if you change that it reflects the change in all the pages that the section was included. Which is great for customer support and of course technical documentation. Did I mention that you can create as many different wikis as you like? Confluence calls those "spaces" and it's a great way to keep things separated. I use different wiki spaces for my employees handbook, customer support, app manuals, design documents per project, etc. The possibilities are endless and having them separately helps with security between different roles in the company and outside of it.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs and Dropbox Paper

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: I made the switch from Google Docs because I wanted a more robust solution that would support a more deep infrastructure and would be easy to manage and interconnect with other project management, software development and customer-facing solutions.

Switched From: Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Confluence is far more advanced and fits our business model as a documentation and knowledge-base solution. The price is right and Atlassian seems to continuously develop new features that help us create awesome online media-rich documents for us and our clients.

Great Tool for Content Organization and Management

Comments: We have been using Confluence as a main software for content management. We use it for all our project related documentation like high level business requirements, enhancement requests, technical specs, meeting notes, project roadmaps etc. It seamlessly integrates with JIRA, which makes it such a great tool to be used by AGILE teams. Overall, Confluence is a very robust and powerful tool and it provides a central place for all your documentation.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Powerful wiki software

Comments: Confluence has become the place for us to collect information, across our business. We use it document our processes and policies (the access controls prove useful there), and our development teams use it on a daily basis to record the outcomes of discussions and to share knowledge.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

An excellent resource for collaborating and working together as a team.

Comments: Confluence is an extremely flexible tool that can serve multiple purposes, such as document creation, project collaboration, knowledge management, and internal wiki creation. It provides a plethora of templates and macros that can streamline and automate various tasks. Its collaboration features are abundant, including real-time co-authoring of documents and the ability to tag individuals in comments.Additionally, Confluence provides robust access control and permission settings to guarantee that only authorized individuals can access specific information.

Pros:

It's incredibly simple to work collaboratively and provide feedback on written documents using this platform. Its "wiki on steroids" approach is particularly effective for overcoming writer's block, allowing users to start writing without hesitation and continuously improve their work.In addition, the tool's seamless integration of pages and information, as well as its ability to connect with Jira and extract relevant data, are noteworthy.

Cons:

Many essential features are only accessible through paid plugins, which is disappointing. For instance, the team calendar should be a standard feature available to all users.Furthermore, the administrative features are often difficult to use and unclear, particularly for larger organizations that require a greater degree of granularity.The pricing model for the plugins is also problematic. For example, users are required to purchase a license for each person on the platform, even if only a small number of individuals will use the plugin.

Great to work with for a remote company

Comments: We are a remote company, and we need all of our policies and processes in one place. Confluence has really helped us to solve this particular aspect, as now we can just put everything together in one document - the final user now don't have to keep navigating to multiple places in multiple platforms, as now everything is maintained in confluence.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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 documentation platform

Comments: This is amazing software with close to zero disadvantages. It corresponds with Jira which is great, also provides documentation, you can create pages, see notes related to a specific theme, besides pages you can create tables, images, etc. I would recommend this software to anyone who needs a program that creates documentation. Also, they are looking to improve their software by making a lot of updates.

Pros:

Confluence has a lot of advantages and here are some of them. Confluence is part of Atlassian Suite which is connected with Jira and you can easily integrate them. This software provides a documentation platform for your projects. You can create links to other pages, see other documents that are related to some specific project, also it provides you with different kind of images and charts to make your document more powerful. This software supports everything starting from images, tables, diagrams, charts, whatever you need Confluence has it. Also, another thing that is worth mentioning is that you can see if anyone has made any change to the document and if it has you will get notified.

Cons:

There are not so many disadvantages, to be honest, this is great software, maybe a bit hard for some beginners, but not too hard and you will have to spend some time on this software to know how it works. Another thing that I don’t like is that they are changing Confluence non-stop. They are doing updates most of the time and changing the software. I understand that they need to make changes for better but that can sometimes be annoying because you know something where is it and then they change it and add something else and you have to learn again.

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.

One of the greatest tools to collaborate and build project knowledge base

Pros:

A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plan to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location. The confluence editor feature makes it easier for me to create documents, review and share feedback and changes can be tracked thru page histories. Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users to navigate between pages and information. It is easy to build links within pages by adding an anchor. You don't need to remember which part of the page you have read a certain information and do page scroll. I like the gliffy plugin. Whenever I need to embed a workflow diagram, adding gliffy makes it easier to attach flowchart, it's dynamic as changes in the diagram is reflected in the page. I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them Documenting a test report is easier with the JIRA integration - JIRA issues highlighted and linked and JIRA issue filters can be embedded and since these two (JIRA and Confluence) work hand in hand, it makes delivering software in agile approach a lot easier.

Cons:

To beautify your confluence page, you need to know which macros and plugins you need to add but by doing these, one needs to have very basic knowledge in html or programming which could be a learning curve to most people. But lots of how to videos are shared by Atlassian and lots of documented procedures are out there shared by experienced users. One just need to be resourceful. The challenges in embedding spreadsheet with macros and formatting tables are not a challenge anymore if you know what macro or plugin to use. Another issue is sometimes finding the information you are seeking is not successful and sometimes the information search for spans to multiple pages - but information actually can be managed by adding labels which again boils down to the user having the knowledge that this feature exists.

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.

Awesome

Comments: Company: Midsize
Industry: Legal
Documentation is my bread & butter and I have never used a better solution than Confluence. I also use JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, which taken all together amount to a mostly-seamless solution for all of my documentation needs!

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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!)

Confluence for Team collaboration

Comments: My overall business experience is great. Earlier team was sharing project content via emails that is a clumsy way to mamage and store the information, but as more and more people are using confluence it has become a repository and one stop shop to put knowledge at one palce which can be referred as and when needed. This is a great tool and a game changer for how we manage our collaboration within team for the project under Agile way

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.