Confluence Reviews

Real-time simultaneous editing
Ease of finding and organizing what I've written
Constantly adding new features
Integration with Jira and Trello is great, but also works as lightweight project management by itself

Honestly, they've fixed my biggest cons, like storage space (now you can buy a bigger plan) and they keep adding more things.
I think my colleagues would say there's still a learning curve, which is understandable, and I think Confluence has been changing the interface with more tips and features for new users (which is sometimes confusing for long-time users like me, LOL)
One big con is still the limited integration with MS Office. Confluence fully replaces the need for Word in most cases, so that's not a big deal, but I wish the Excel integration and/or the table functionality was better.
Also, printing is pretty tough when you have tables.

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 navigation bar per space (topic area) of store notes coupled with a range of text formatting and style features - Confluence is one of the best software tools available for notes taking! The inbuilt macros, linking page functions, mentions, comments and live editing all add to the allure of the Atlassian product range.

Confluence can be a steep learning curve due to the overwhelming amount of functionality available - including the permissions and access control clashes.

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

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.

It can become a bit slow sometimes, causing the pages to take longer to load and look for information.

It's the greatest centralized location for everyone involved in a project or at a company to store, share, and retrieve information and data. It's helpful for teamwork because it's simple to edit, it syncs with Jira, and it can provide useful visual representations of data.

The design of Confluence just seems archaic and cumbersome to me. It's also difficult to allow access, and to copy and paste across other applications like Microsoft Office.

It is easily accessible and you have loads of feature to customize your knowledge(renging from Tables , custom built Boards and even Linking tickets makes it a very straight forward solution for knowledge capture) pages or project management files , tools are easy to integrate and work with (highly recommend a cooperation with Jira , as they work very well togather.)

Administration part can be a pain from time to time , unless you know exactly what roles are correct , it can become a bit confusing .

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).

It is somewhat hard to speak about Confluence pros without constantly resorting to integration with other Atlassian products.
Confluence was a first haven for a lot of companies and developers, it is safe to say that most of us started their meeting with information systems world with Confluence.
It offers some sort if hierarchy for documents, crossreferences, editing. Confluence is offers a number of connectors to other products, and what is of most importance here is that confluence has a set of tools to build statistical data into user-friendly representation.
Confluence is a part of Atlassian ecosystem and this is something to keep in mind, because this is the direction developers are pushing you.
Confluence may be deployed on premises which is a significant distinction from many other products. It is costly but there is a comprehensive set of documentation, reliable techsupport.
Confluence is a handy management tool for it is capable of collecting, digesting and representing a data from various sources. Say, you may render server status page, Jira's taks flow, gantt diagram and all of them will be live.
Confluence is quite reliable system and I can not say I can remember a single bug while using it.
Mobile and desktop apps for the most platform are there.
It has notification, chats, email listings etc.

To start with it is pricy.
It is slow. The editor is hugely outdated.
It pushes you toward other Atlassian products and while the ecosystem itself is not bad, this is not something you'd want these days. Basically, it represents too much of vendor lock and there are a lot of much better substitutions.
And the overall design is stuck in 2010. It is heavy, leak, slow. User paths through different usage scenarios could use a hand of able UI designer.

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.

Confluence distinguishes itself through its history and complete traceability, which is extremely beneficial for collaborative work within the company. The platform meticulously records all activities and changes made to the pages, allowing for a complete audit of previous contributions and modifications. This feature is particularly useful for projects where you need to track the evolution of content and keep a record of revisions made.

Although Confluence has many advantages, it also has some drawbacks that should be mentioned. One of them is its limited design and visual presentation capabilities. While images and other visual elements can be inserted into pages, the customization and design tools are less sophisticated when compared to other content creation platforms. This can be aggravating for those who want more aesthetic freedom in their documents and presentations.

I have to say that Confluence is an innovative solution that stand out from others of it's calliber in the market . Acquisition and implementation costs were within our budget range. It is also soo easy to use for everybody in our team thanks to it's UI that is perfectly tailored. Most of our work as the vet society in Vetcare Africa is usually outside the office and Confluence has to engage and collaborate as a team working on different rotation projects. It is remote friendly and centralize all the information in one space from tasks allocated to each one of us to projects from where we can coordinate and get status update on our peers as well as shared projects. It is therefore easy to get everyone at par across teams through comments, mentions and notification. It is also flexible enough with options to create plans with texts, tables, images etc . Imagine all of these in one single place and has customizable templates

I have not encountered any single dislike with Confluence. It is an easy to use tool that enhances collaboration by also integrating with tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive