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Confluence

Score7.8 out of 10

2,306 Reviews and Ratings

What is Confluence?

Confluence is a collaboration and content sharing platform used primarily by customers who are already using Atlassian's Jira project tracking product. The product appeals particularly to IT users.

Read more details.

Categories & Use Cases

Product Demos

Confluence Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Confluence has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 2,306 ratings of Confluence's features
View all Confluence features

Top Performing Features

  • Integrates with Outlook

    Integrates with Microsoft Outlook to tie in email threads.

    Category average: 9.3

  • Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts

    Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts.

    Category average: 6.2

  • Access control

    Users can control access to (shared) files, including different levels of access such as view-only or permission to edit.

    Category average: 7.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Discussions

    Users can join groups or message boards for forum-style collaboration.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Audio files

    Supports audio file types, such as .mp3, .mp4, and .wav

    Category average: 7.7

  • Visual planning tools

    Includes visual tools such as pinboards, mind-maps, or charts for collaborative brainstorming and/or workflow planning.

    Category average: 6.1

Who Buys & Uses Atlassian Confluence

Confluence Reviews

What users are saying about Confluence.
View all Confluence reviews

Pros

  • Seamless integration with Jira, enabling linked workflows between development and documentation.
  • User-friendly interface, simplifying page structuring and document creation.
  • Centralized knowledge base, facilitating efficient information sharing and project documentation.

Cons

  • Search and usability issues can hinder information retrieval.
  • Some users find it difficult to locate specific information within the platform.

Atlassian Confluence Review: Feature packed, Promotoes collaboration

Incentivized
Amit Kumar SharmaView profile
CTO in Engineering at Hubble Connected (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Atlassian Confluence as our central knowledge management and collaboration platform, supporting various cross culture teams of our company. It serves as a single source of important documentation, project management, and cross-functional collaboration. It also helps us to maintain a historical record of decisions, changes, and processes. It also enables all our real-time collaboration with inline comments, notifications, and @mentions.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • Search function can be better like how google search engine delivers the most relevant content first
  • Add Excel-like formulas, sorting, and filtering directly in Confluence tables.
  • Auto archiving of old stale pages should be there as a function to free up of space
  • Things can be hidden from administrator where members can create private pages

Return on Investment

  • We totally rely on this tool since a decade now and despite being so much transition in our company it has served us well in those transitions
  • Many times, during security audits we are asked to showcase our readiness for various compliance points and confluence helps us a lot in maintaining that
  • Talking about Confluence in front of clients and customers gives us an upper hand that we are up to date with latest trend and technologies and tools for our RnD planning and management

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint and Google Drive

Other Software Used

Microsoft SharePoint, Slack, Google Drive

Organization, project planning, and documentation are all possible with Confluence

Incentivized
Jessica KlossView profile
Associate Product Owner in Product Management at Expert Institute (201-500 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atlassian Confluence helps us to organize operations, project planning, and important company knowledge within one central repository. This product helps us by keep everything we need as a Product Development team in one spot. The flexible formatting of pages as well as the introduction of whiteboards makes this even easier for us. We use whiteboards primarily to story map larger projects, and we absolutely love the feature to convert sticky notes or other posts on the whiteboard into stories/tickets on our Jira board. The seamless connection between Jira and Confluence also makes Confluence the ideal spot for me as a Product Manager to plan future sprints for our Development team and lay out stories from Jira within the sprint plan.

Pros

  • Connection with Jira
  • Ease of use
  • Ability to communicate with others in-product

Cons

  • Whiteboards are still a little janky to use, hard to switch between the cursor and the hand, etc.
  • When editing a page in Atlassian Confluence with tickets from Jira, it does not show the amount of story points per ticket on hover. You have to publish the page/go out of editing mode to see the # of story points which has been a pain point during sprint planning
  • It would be great to create custom templates for pages by user so we can add those templates to pages when we want to use them, ie for a Sprint Plan

Return on Investment

  • Project planning and tracking with deadlines
  • Determining project scope and resources
  • Developing a POC for projects/products we are investigating/thinking about implementing

Usability

Other Software Used

Atlassian Jira, Fullstory, Tuskr

An essential collaboration tool

Incentivized
Pierre-Alexandre GarneauView profile
Business Analyst in Information Technology at Vosker (201-500 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Confluence to help document our software development efforts. This includes writing requirements for developers and other team members to use, as well as business analysis documents and other tracking information for our projects. It's an essential tool in our organization for sharing information between teams. We often use it in conjunction with Jira software since both connect well.

Pros

  • Documentation
  • Jira integration
  • Integration with plug-ins for extension

Cons

  • Occasional UI bugs/issues
  • Important features requiring paid-for plug-ins
  • Only admins can create page templates

Return on Investment

  • Confluence has allowed us to document requirements for large software efforts so that developers, QA, and other team members are on the same page.
  • It has served as a coordination tool for "PI planning" events to plan for upcoming quarters with all teams together.
  • It has improved our Jira documentation by being able to place Jira documentation directly inside Confluence documents.

Usability

Other Software Used

Atlassian Jira, Miro

Good enough, but likely better options available depending on your needs

Incentivized
Brandon StokesView profile
Global Revenue Enablement Manager in Sales at Proximus Global (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atlassian Confluence is used pretty piecemeal at my organization. Many of the more technical teams store all of their processes, policies, and even some code in Atlassian Confluence and use Jira for project management as well. On the other hand, less technical teams use other programs that are more tailored to their niche (i.e. Customer Success, People, Finance).

Pros

  • Space organization
  • Permissions management
  • Document collaboration

Cons

  • Browser extension for quicker access to content
  • Live collaboration

Return on Investment

  • Efficient to use in conjunction with Jira
  • Needed to be replaced for Sales/Marketing/CS teams because of tedious nature of updating and finding content
  • We now have somewhat redundant programs because of needs not met by Atlassian Confluence (i.e. embedded content in Salesforce)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Coda, Microsoft SharePoint, Spekit, Highspot and Asana

Other Software Used

Microsoft Planner, LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com), Motivosity, Seismic Learning, WorkRamp, Microsoft Project

If you're using Atlassian products it's the reason to use this

Incentivized
Rodrigo DiazView profile
Product Manager in Product Management at Futurewhiz (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A lot of our documentation for both the products and internal way of working is setup there. We've at a certain point made it the place where business logic was defined so developers could access it.

Pros

  • Ties directly with Jira
  • You can reference someone in the organization
  • Has some nice formating on the warnings and other widgets

Cons

  • Layout of the pages are a bit restrictive and they could look nicer
  • Working with other colleagues at the same time
  • Having more dynamic spaces that are more seemless integrated

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to go back to projects years before and make better decisions based on the documentation placed there
  • It's integrated directly with our task management tool

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Miro, GitHub and Slack

Other Software Used

Miro, Slack

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