Confluence Reviews: 4.1/5 — Solid Choice

It has a list of impressive features and in theory sounds like a great app but...

Navigating the app is overly complicated, and the search doesn't help. I spend more time looking for the articles than reading/contributing. The Atlassian ID was also a mess, with a complicated account deletion process. Trying to download images a co-worker has uploaded has been challenging, they either download as a different format or they've disappeared (5yr+ files). My last issue is the content editor seems a little off and overly complicated to use.

Collating basic information like phone numbers, settings, etc.

Not much at all - though I am sure there are positives.

I did not like the amount of research, data entry and unable to find documents

We used confulence to manage a new website design and launch

There really isn't anything I like about this product.

It's not user-friendly (from a content management and end-user standpoint) or intuitive. The tutorials offered by Confluence are hard to read/not helpful. It's hard to know whether what I am reading is for the Cloud-based version or not. Plug-ins are expensive. The search does not function well. Confluence roles out changes with little notice that greatly impacts functionality, and look and feel.

I have to use it as a knowledgebase.

Searching file or document is easy to process.

The look is boring, at least the one I can view.

Sharing documents

It's easy for users to collaborate, give permissions, search, integrate JIRA.

how basic it is. Simple is good but with confluence, the architecture is too simple that it doesn't allow for optimal organization of company resources. Highly suggest using for basic sharing needs.

That there are little glitches that happen often and the difficulty of adding levels to ensure a well rounded structure for a company.

I liked having up to date information on files and programs. It is always current and makes things much better in that regard.

I found it very clunky. In other words, I found it difficult to use and not at all intuitive.

We used it for project management and IT projects (which it is ideally suited for!)

The ability to organize the various sections and use it as a wiki is great. I like being able to easily link tasks and confluence pages. Seems to be able to handle just about any size attachments without too much trouble.

Response times (between click and anything actually happening) is terrible to the point of being unusable. When we were initially testing it out to use with our company, sometimes the lag time between clicking and going to a different page was upwards of a minute. Completely unacceptable.

None. We decided not to use it and went with a different 3rd party software.

Nothing to be honest. It's difficult to find something good about Confluence at least, using it in the way I use it in my company. It tries to be like a wiki for each project and a collaboration tool but it's interface is not very friendly. At least is a good place to centralice data and information of a project although it gets out of date quite soon because it's difficult to manage.

The interface is old and ugly. It's not easy to find things and the search input does not work very well. It does not do anything that a normal wiki software wouldn't do. As I said before, probably is the way we're using it but I see many other products in the market far better looking and easy to use than this. As a collaboration tool it does not work as well, it does not engage with the user and we basically start using it the first weeks but we all give up very soon because we find other ways to store information.

We use it for projects. We try to store information and use it for collaboration but it's not friendly and we always end up forgetting about it. We use JIRA a lot and confluence comes with it, this is why we always give it a try...

It's easy to share the link with people, once you've spent way too much time putting info on the site.

It's basic, the interface is outdated, the look is outdated, it's all around just a clunky piece of software to use.

Sharing lots of information without using a shared drive.

I like the fact that it is easy to embed interactive content in Confluence documents such as references to JIRA issues, JIRA filtered reports and status labels. I also found it useful to structure documents in a hierarchical tree as it makes it easy for other people to find documents.

There are no collaborative editing and in-line commenting features which meant that we gradually switched over to Google Suite.

Storing product requirements, roadmap, design files, engineering documentation.

Flexibility in building internal pages where everyone can contribute

The flexibility also results in complexity. Maintaining a good menu structure and keeping things flexible for users can make your knowledge base messy

Collaboration/sharing knowledge and documents across multiple teams.

Nothing, you could get the same result with an OpenSource product

The portal is very chaotics and need a lot of hardware resources. You could get the same result with an OpenSource product

knowledge management, integration with Jira

Share information among coworkers to improve communications

Have to be behind VPN Hard to search across pages

Communication Very little

I like the ease in which you can create a WIKI and the nice format they are done in.

Pretty much everything else beyond WIKIs. Unfortunately the software is not a great platform to work in and is not conducive to the way people work. In addition the company is a pain to work with and doesn't seem like they care about their customers or working with their customers. Support from Atlassian for this platform leaves much to be desired.

Originally used as an Intranet and for a basic one it does that well. Was easy to implement and use.

Not much to say here. I suppose that it is fairly easy to use

The layout is confusing. Security is a joke, although this may be the way our team has implemented it. It does not organize subjects nearly as well as SharePoint.

Thought sharing, project organization.

Integrates well with other Atlasssian products, also has good integrations with third party systems and applications

Permissions and restrictions are a disaster, user management is a bit of a nightmare. System upgrades while easy to apply can sometimes break the system or other plugin support. Overall pretty clunky.

We use Confluence to share info amongst teams. That is really the only big benefit we wee. I wish it had a better employee directory function with ties to ADP/PeopleSoft/Oracle , etc.

I like best that you can use full formatting and html. Confluence functions like a wiki to store information for everyone to see. You must share this information with the right people though, for it to work.

It easily buries information. The email notifications are so frequent and meaningless that the first thing everyone did was hide them in a separate outlook folder--therefore notifications are totally and completely broken. No one knows what changes are made in confluence unless they review them manually. If they do not, and you want a teammate to see a change or update to a page, you must manually send them the link through email. So why aren't we just using google drive, again? is a question I constantly ask, especially since we quit using Hipchat.

We are solving educational technology problems. confluence does act as a partial documentation.

As a team collaboration intranet site, Confluence brings all departments together

This is the most difficult application to upgrade from versions. When attempting in place upgrade it wipes all configurations and add-on features. In the last year I have upgraded MS BizTalk Server and MS Exchange Server to newer versions, although more complex, but I had very little issues. With Confluence if Atlassian wants to compete with rivals the development team needs to create a better upgrade path than the current 'doing business as usual' path.

Business problems that are solved saved us tremendous storage space on our SAN and Exchange mailboxes. We literally changed the culture of sending large attachments via email to co-workers, and then that attachment was being saved in multiple directories on network drives. With Confluence departments are sharing these large documents without creating 4 copies all over the network.