Confluence Reviews: 4.1/5 — Solid Choice

Confluence can store what seems to be INFINITE amounts of information. It can be organized really well.

If you do not organize well, and lets face it even if you do organize well, the search tool is miserable when trying to find anything.

This is used as our internal wiki. It's great that we can put so much data including documents, but the search tool doesn't allow us to find anything easily.

* fully fledged product within Atlassian, which is great if you utilize the Atlassian product suite already. * great plugin additions to add in easy graphics and diagrams where words do not suffice.

* structure - it's hard to know how to use across all teams/areas and it would be best if there was an onboarding process for an account to setup how they want documentation to look for select PROJECTS, as an example, and that would make it easy for all users. * interface is not obvious at first glance and takes some getting used to and continual training for the intended outcome.

Internal documentation of processes/products for internal sharing.

Web-based. Allowed hierarchy. Allowed custom plugins. Linked to Bitbucket. The idea of a wiki makes sense and it promotes companies to record information and avoid tribal knowledge.

Formatted poorly. There were no good plugins in the store, and everything cost money. We are already paying for the suite. Now we have to pay to embed a word document? No thank you. Maybe not confluences fault, but we had a bunch of "non-programmers" who were updating the same document again and again as v1,v2,v3, failing to understand that confluence does version control for them. Also the whole thing blew out of control. We had pages scattered everywhere. The hierarchy of pages aren't obvious and the search is not very good.

Organizing flight simulation documents and software designs. It's nice to give people links, and build a documentation tree.

I like that our teams have a place to update information and that everyone has access to the most updated versions of processes that are written up, guidelines, and archive information.

I feel like it is a bit hard and taxing to navigate. There are so many tabs and links in the left panel that is a bit confusing on where to go to get the exact info I am looking for.

Having one place where employees can update the information and everyone has access to it.

Central resource for various internal teams

Formatting issues and limitations. Still have to supplement with Google docs

Standardization of processes for knowledge sharing/transfer Keeping track of client trends

Accessible through the web so you can view content on desktop and mobile

Most everything; reminds me of just an online version of your file manager but worse bc it's viewed through your web browser

Sharing information across organizations

The fact that my whole company continues to engage and add content. That it is searchable.

The old and new version are one in the same. Albeit, I see the light with the newest version but it's so slow and drags along. Editing documents is kind of a nightmare, but not nearly as bad as attempting to organize spaces in a meaningful way.

Documentation. Level 1 trainings. Dissemination of knowledge from long time level 2 agents to the rest of the company. Avoiding the gate keeper scenario we're in for the future.

I like that for engineers who understand it it works great and that it has a lot of plug ins and can help departments individually.

I am not a fan of it for the purpose of an intranet or for not technical departments. Its not user friendly and the GUI needs to be updated it feels old and dated and not pushing forward. I am also not a fan of the Jira confluence connection.

It solved the lack of an intranet and has been used with Jira to manage tickets and projects.

Confluence, at its best, encouraged team member to take pride in architecting a record of their works and system and anything they felt others should be doing. The many ways to make a blank confluence page m eaningful, tight integration with diagramming tools, all made it a high-potential platform.

While Salesforce.com has a preset group of Sales-related objects, relationships, workflows, etc that guide your team in making good use of the platform, Confluence does not. Confluence jumped right to the Force.com stage, where no rules apply and robust tools are handed off with the assumption that iron-fisted top-down organizational discipline will keep use of Confluence orderly, consistent, and useful. But it's a product for smaller companies who don't have that kind of pyramid-management. Too messy - we didn't follow our own rules. Also, the search was awful.

Process documentation, basic training and how-tos. We were marginally successful at, for shorter periods, referring to documentation as needed. Usually later forgotten and re-absorbed as institutional memory only.

It usually works well and provides some cool tools for aggregating content from other pages, creating TOC, pulling out summaries, and linking with other content. The comments handling has gotten a lot better. It used to be comments were only at the end and then they would become stale as the document was changed to address them. Now comments can be attached to specific parts of a document and thus it's clear what they're referring to and when the doc changes the comments can be removed if no longer applicable.

Since they switched from available wiki markup to only wysiwyg it's been a mess. The wysiwyg is usually ok but once you get into some mixes of formatting it can get messed up and many of the more advanced tags are not really supported in wysiwyg editor so you still end up typing tags and they sometimes get recognized and converted properly and sometimes they don't and the tag text just sits there with no clear way to tell Confluence this is a tag.

Share internal data with company, notes on past trips, locations, thoughts for future endeavors.

I like that it works with the Atlassian Suite

I'm not such a fan of Confluence to begin with; seems like most of its features can be done in Stash.

Documenting internal practices, codebases, etc.

Good place to get a whole team on the same page.

The navigation and UI seem dated. It is hard to jump in and know what to do.

Collaboration. It has provided marginal improvement, but those who don't use it daily find it hard to understand.

User based intra-net of sorts, lots of formatting options, many macros to choose from for best form of display. Love being able to look for frequently-asked-questions

No great packaged hierarchy of pages.... unless someone emails out the confluence page, it's likely not going to get found. The search function is kind of a joke. There should really be a "tag" function that you can add to your pages to help organization.

process documentation, team organization, great way to group resources all in one place. Great for reference once you save a page into your "save for later" category.

It is easy to create and view documents with many formatting and styling options, support for uploading files and a good integration with JIRA.

I find it quite messy and it is quite difficult to find specific documents. It has a built-in search but it doesn't work very well (or its usage is very confusing).

With this tool all the company has a common place to store all the documentation for all the projects.

I get notified in my email inbox when a teammate asks something from me.

Ugly/confusing interface, too structured and systematized. Seems to encourage needless delegation and procrastination. A lot of the time I avoid logging on. I sit between a variety of teams and it's annoying to have to navigate to separate space where it could be centralized.

Task organization.

Automatic notifications are great and help to monitor new issues and outcomes.

The UI is sometimes confusing especially when setting-up things

co working and communication issues

I like that anyone can access the data and that you can easily create pages, sub pages, etc to store your information all in a central database.

I find it extremely difficult to find information once it is stored on Confluence. My entire company uses Confluence and even with the search function, I can never seem to find anything.

My company uses Confluence as a central location for data for all functional areas. This allows everyone and anyone inside the company the upload and download information.

Is in use by users & less training curve

There are new products that are effective better & efficient with less security issues.

Colloboration

That I can easily set it up and organize my documents.

Not too fond of the gui when it comes to creating documemt layoits.

Solved my need to keep all testing and user documentation in one place where everyone could access it.

I like that it is one place my company SHOULD go to get information...don't have to search through different platforms to find what I am looking for.

Seems clunky to figure out how to organize certain things. Mostly, we do not have buy-in from all in company because it does not integrate with platforms their teams are using.

One place to find everything

Once setup at an organization it is easy enough for anyone to use and publish documentation or information about about varying subjects and can be used as a simple internal website maker

if you have ever built a website before it is extremely frustrating to use some of the limited or half functions that never do quite what you want or require too much fiddling to do something simple

internal publication in a shared space of product knowledge - to store for what we've done and save from loss of information from employee turnover - landing page for others in the company to know more about a product or service

Good platform for creating and maintaining documentation, with a wide selection of 3rd party plugins for additional documentation.

Users are being forced off a fully functional Server (on-prem) product and onto their Cloud product which is trash. The Cloud product lacks compatibility with many plugins available for the Server product, has limitations not present in the server product (nested macros), forces the use of the "new" editor, which lacks features present in the old editor, and somehow manages to render pages that look fine in the Server product in a way that just looks wrong (spacing?). This is just a small list of the many annoyances with the Cloud product that also has the distinction of being extremely sluggish.

Provides a platform for creating and maintaining documentation that is searchable (barely).

It's one of the oldest platforms - it's probably got every single usage, versioning, and administration feature you can think of.

It's one of the oldest platforms, and it shows in its slowness, awkwardness in its editor, the convolution of its setup/nomenclature

Product documentation - we got started documenting our product features, functionality and UI decisions, quickly realized how painful Confliuence was to use and therefore wasteful for a small team, and then switched to a combination of Notion and gitbook.

The thing that I like from confluence is that you can have an organized space, it has some tweaks here and there that can be use to document most processes.

Confluence is not very dynamic as you would expect, the add ons that you can add to your wiki are not good, they are not innovating enough to make confluence work. It is kind of difficult to add graphs or other kind of content like small video previews or video tutorials. Confluence makes documentation not very appealing.

Documentation mainly, if you need a place where to store all the documentation from a new project you are in or just want to make a step by step tutorial on how to use your tool, this tool might help you to do so, it is not very intuitive, and it is lacking of many cool stuff that other tools offer.

Its a nice way to organize internal communication though it can be clunky and confusing to navigate.

Sometimes when scrolling pages stick. Jira navigation and association can be confusing.

Keeping updated on Jira tickets, product roadmaps, releases and feature requests.

Much could be better about Confluence. My company uses it as a "go to handbook" since there really isn't another tool quite yet and the price, is better than any others they have found.

I don't like it at all. It is very bland and not appealing to the eye for anyone. It is terrible at searching as well. To me, it looks like a 90's style layout which also takes a long while to load up every single time.

It serves as an employee handbook for all practices across the company. Helps you find and store quick information to educate yourself if needed.

Confluence offers flexible templates, solid sharing, storage, and easy access solutions for business looking to communicate and collaborate across people, teams, and offices.

As a product manager, I spend most of my time in Aha! managing strategies and releases and in Jira managing sprints and stories. While Confluence allows me to record and share information, I would rather do so in Aha! or Jira to minimize the systems I have to use and the places my teams have to go for information.

Recording and sharing of information. My organization has used Confluence for years, and we have benefitted from it; however, the recent increase in the use of Google Docs, Aha!, and Jira has made Confluence more of a burden than a help.

You can keep a historical record of changes and edits

Tedious and difficult to keep up to date or collaborate in real time

Keep track of projects notes

The whole team is able to use this tool.

Ita not user friendly at all. It’s head to find things

Helps see who has added

Ability to share ideas with several departments. Multiple people can submit. Easy to tell when items are updated or added.

Difficult to organize and search items. Items get buried and are difficult to search and find.

Access to policy and procedure by multiple departments.