Atlassian Confluence vs. MadCap Flare

Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for housing important information and resources across the organization, as it's very easy to search and find content across different teams and departments. The search function is mostly very accurate and the additional tagging with keywords also helps in the search experience. It's also good at tagging other team members, which triggers an automated email to them. Atlassian Confluence also has an extensive template library for all kinds of purposes like project management, etc., which saves time overall.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

Incentivized

• Its integration with Jira for tracking development and the bugs and work linked to detailed Confluence documentation.
• We use it extensively for writing Software Product Requirement Documents, feature specs, architecture designs, and retrospectives.
• Our company follows compliance very seriously, so it helps in streamlining all documentation for ISO27001/27017 compliance and security-related information.
• Its integration with various tools allows us to create flow diagrams which are often required to make client and customer understand the overall flow of interactions across various modules of the design architecture

Incentivized

• Organizing articles via an overall project outline.
• Syncing with teammates.

Incentivized

• You need to watch over the structure of the content yourself. if not you can get information added anywhere so nobody can find it.
• Top search field is hard to set to only search a section of pages.
• You really need to think your structure through before starting. a guide when setting up at the start could help in that perspective.

Incentivized

• Reviewing by internal users / Feedback from customers
• CSS - easier to use an external tool
• Skin styles and management

I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.

It's very intuitive for most things, making it easy to jump in and start creating pages and collaborating. This makes it ideal for onboarding new members to the team. There are a few areas that could be a little smoother, but overall it's a great experience.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

Incentivized

This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.

Incentivized

Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).

This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!

Incentivized

Atlassian Confluence is a super handy hub for sharing ideas and keeping all your docs in one place. While Jira Service Management is more about handling tickets and support issues, Atlassian Confluence really makes teamwork easy. I feel Atlassian Confluence is user-friendly, integrates smoothly with other Atlassian tools, and helps everyone stay in sync. It's great for brainstorming, and project planning as well. Overall, it is a great way to boost collaboration and ensure all team members are on the same page.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare provides for proper single-sourcing of content for an array of needs. Wikis are incredibly limited, static and hard to manage, and content quickly becomes obsolete.

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

• Merging instances has saved search time - We used to have several instances of Atlassian Confluence, which means they're separate and so can't communicate with each other. We've since merged into one instance and now with the help of the search feature can find the documents you're looking for in seconds rather than several minutes.
• Cross linking product assets streamlines following paper trails - Being able to click on a BitBucket link from a Confluence page which then links to a JIRA ticket means you can follow paper trails really easily; seconds rather than several minutes.

Incentivized

• Negative: Wasted hundreds of hours troubleshooting madcap bugs or quirks.
• Positive: We have a robust Help website we can update with ease.

Incentivized