Versatile, powerfull, easy to use

As with other Atlassien products Confluence is just a charm to use. It is a great Wiki and it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving the more atlassian products you combine with it. I would absolutely chose Confluence again in the past and in the future. If you manage it smart (by setting up well conceptualized wiki spaces and making people patreons of certain areas in order to avoid cluttering) I could not imagine any solution better suited to Knowledge management and business documentation than Confluence.

Pros

We use Confluence for serval years now, together with Jira (Ticket Management) and Bamboo (Build Server). It has proven its value time and again for us and provided us with clear, easy to navigate and edit business documentation for almost all areas of business. The Editor is esy to use, there are Plugins for all imaginable use cases (for example specific PDF exports) and a great FAQ and very helpful community. The Editor for content is fantastically in terms of ease of use and results to be generated. Also all Articles are stored versioned, so you can easyly go back a version, or check what has been changed in case you have to get back up to speed on a topic you left checking a while ago. You can follow authors, topics or wiki Spaces so Confluence keeps you in the loop about what is happening. In case you work on confidential material the user access management is just a dream to use, simple, powerful and without any ruged edges. Additional Features are added and when they are they are well thought through and perfectly conceptualized. I never have found a feature which did not deliver what it promised and more. Some are not for me but the ones that were introduced and sounded interesting generally were. This is THE tool for anyone who wants to document all kinds ok business knowledge from simple things like HowTo or FAQ Article to complex branches of deccsion documentations connected to development progress (by Jira ticket integration).

Cons

Confluence has a lot of great features. The main Issue with Wiki Systems often is they work great in teh beginning and later become bogged down with badly maintained content or just forgotten structures. The search for the wiki still is not perfect. It has improved and is fine to use but I have seen better. There are also not a lot of features that support administrators in decluttering a large or huge Wiki and sometimes we had issues for complex, nested user rights. Also as always the case when you have an ecosystem of plugins, you have to make sure anything is compatible with a new version before you update, especially if it is a third party extension. Don't get me wrong, there is not much to complain here, you have to really look hard in order to find anything bad about Confluence.

The Collaboration Platform You've Waited For

We document everything in Confluence. I run a digital marketing team of around 20 people and have a total of 40 users in the tool (a few other teams besides mine use it). It's been a fantastic tool to get everyone on the same page and keep track of our how-tos, meeting notes, plans, goals, features/specs, etc.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

A Simple and Effective Wiki

Confluence is great and currently indispensable tool for our workflow. When we're building a new product or feature, our stories go into JIRA and our documentation lives within Confluence. We also use Confluence for onboarding new employees - our stack, endpoints, databases that we use and documentation have their own Confluence space. We also keep information on existing products we've built and organize them based on tech stack - if you want to look at a Golang or Node.js project, you can easily find it with the way that we've built our spaces. It's proved extremely useful to use these spaces as case studies for future products.

Pros

The beauty of Confluence is its simplicity - while it allows users to organize information in their own preferred way, there is only so much you can do with it. As a result, you can go through multiple Confluence pages and be able to navigate them effectively. A Confluence page can host multiple filetypes - this is useful for doing something like gathering and organizing business requirements for a new product. Mockups can be stored, people can be tagged to be included and notes can be kept, all in one place.

Cons

There is no "draft" preview of a Confluence page - edits are live. I've seen plenty of errors left behind after someone has collaboratively edited a Confluence page and I've often gone in to fix them myself. Search is difficult - while you can filter down based on certain parameters, if you don't know what exactly you're looking for and have a large number of Confluence pages, querying may be tricky.

The best documentation platform

This is amazing software with close to zero disadvantages. It corresponds with Jira which is great, also provides documentation, you can create pages, see notes related to a specific theme, besides pages you can create tables, images, etc. I would recommend this software to anyone who needs a program that creates documentation. Also, they are looking to improve their software by making a lot of updates.

Pros

Confluence has a lot of advantages and here are some of them. Confluence is part of Atlassian Suite which is connected with Jira and you can easily integrate them. This software provides a documentation platform for your projects. You can create links to other pages, see other documents that are related to some specific project, also it provides you with different kind of images and charts to make your document more powerful. This software supports everything starting from images, tables, diagrams, charts, whatever you need Confluence has it. Also, another thing that is worth mentioning is that you can see if anyone has made any change to the document and if it has you will get notified.

Cons

There are not so many disadvantages, to be honest, this is great software, maybe a bit hard for some beginners, but not too hard and you will have to spend some time on this software to know how it works. Another thing that I dont like is that they are changing Confluence non-stop. They are doing updates most of the time and changing the software. I understand that they need to make changes for better but that can sometimes be annoying because you know something where is it and then they change it and add something else and you have to learn again.

Great Resource Library within the JIRA Space

Overall, Confluence has served our company well, as we subscribe to a number of Atlassian products. The immediate integration with these other products makes the Confluence application very desirable for our business model, and offers us a much needed solution without much additional effort or thought. If you are already using Atlassian products, Confluence is a great solution for centralizing and organizing all of your assets. If you have more advances needs and do not already use Atlassian products, you may want to explore alternative options.

Pros

Confluence offers my company a unique solution for creating and organizing documentation and assets that need to be share amongst an entire team. In addition, it offers us a means to share some of those same documents and assets with our customers without any additional effort. Its advance permissions schemes allow you to dictate which users have access to which files, and its ease of use allows for quick publication and instant distribution. As we also use JIRA for project management, Confluence is a great complement for linking supplemental, more detailed files to ongoing projects.

Cons

Confluence word processing features are a bit rudimentary. While the application itself is easy to use, its feature limitations only allow for a certain level of detail and imagination when creating new documents. While it links seamless into the JIRA project management platform, it does come with an additional cost per user, which quick racks up your monthly Atlassian bill. For more advanced needs, an alternative platform may be a better fit.

A well-organized documentation graveyard

Overall Confluence is a good platform to store your documentation and make it searchable for later usage. Although it doesn't solve the issue that most companies have, which is that often you'll find outdated pages or incomplete ones. This doesn't mean it's a Confluence issue, but it will definitely not help in solving this.

Pros

Confluence is a very good documentation platform, with its easy to use GUI and markup syntax ( although not compatible with Markdown, unless a plugin is installed ), will offer you a good way to organize your documentation based on projects and Page trees. You can also tag those pages and have a full search that will help you finding what you're searching for. Last but least, the platform offers extensibility through a plugin system which will get you covered.

Cons

When it comes to documentation, no software is doing their best. Often you will find out that creating pages, tagging them and giving them nice titles, will definitely not help you in finding what you search for. Although Confluence tries to help a lot in this, definitely is not a bulletproof solution. So if you suffer from documentation graveyard, unfortunately Confluence will not help your situation to make it better. Also, although Plugins are available, as Jira they are very expensive even for super simple features ( like Markdown integration ).

Not the greatest one but does a descent job of maintaining knowledgebase

Overall the experience is "Okay" the only reason to use confluence is that it is easy to collaborate as it is part of Atlassian's suite of products.

Pros

Confluence is part of the Atlassian suite of products which makes managing everything easy. We use Jira for project management and using Confluence along with Jira helps us easily collaborate on our knowledge base.

Cons

The formatting options are limited, it is not easy to create anchors for headings in the document which was a big issue for us, we were not able to create small menu for the page at the top. Most of the basic configuration is not there by default, many times you need to buy it from market place.

Confluence : Excellent product

Overall I am a satisfied user of confluence. Its feature rich and easy to navigate. Highly recommended this product for any company.

Pros

We are using Confluence as an internal wiki. It provides a lot of features which makes it easy for creating knowledge resources. The built in template in confluence let us quickly create project documentations.

Cons

Some of the templates provided in this is little difficult to understand. The user interface is a bit confusing sometimes when searching for a particular resource.

good tool to manage all your Docs, Notes, Guides, Spike or any thing that you write

overall its a good software to have one must try it before judging it.

Pros

this tool is good to manage all your organization's documents. you can create spaces just like folders and structures in windows to organize your work.it provides good tools to create a documents and style its contents. one can create really cool and attractive document if he is good at it. you can also easily search for documents using a search bar. your can link other documents in a document. you can attach files into the document. you can even link JIRA tickets in the document or link the document to the JIRA ticket because it easily configured and integrated with the JIRA. its a good tool to have.

Cons

the only cron i found was that it misses some editing features, and its sometimes hard to style a document if you are new to it. you need to discover alot and learn how to create cool documents. you can style it like a web page but it will require dedication. but once you are used to it. its gets better and better and easier

Could be a lot better

Not great, not terrible. I use it almost daily, it's useful for my company to have content and information under one umbrella and be able to share these things across so many departments. However, I wouldn't be very eager to recommend it to someone else since it's hard to use and the user-experience could be improved significantly.

Pros

I like that it's a complex database that can be organized by categories and it's extremely useful to find all the relevant information for your job in one place.

Cons

I think the user experience is less than great and something that should be a lot better in this era. It doesn't look great, it's not easy-to-use, and it makes categorizing hard and time-consuming. Sometimes it feels like I have to create the interface while working in it and I do feel it should be a lot easier and user-friendly.

Great documentation platform for both intranets and customer-facing hubs

The experience I had the last 9-10 years that me and my colleagues worked with Confluence is excellent. The document editor works smoothly even from the mobile app that is offered. There are many article templates to choose from when you start creating an article, from decision making documents to marketing strategy forms and solution focused how-to pages. Confluence supports a lot of media types in the pages, so it's easy to create helpful articles with video, audio, images and many more like attention panels, embedded spreadsheets, etc. You can even embed the contents of one section of a page to another page, so that if you change that it reflects the change in all the pages that the section was included. Which is great for customer support and of course technical documentation. Did I mention that you can create as many different wikis as you like? Confluence calls those "spaces" and it's a great way to keep things separated. I use different wiki spaces for my employees handbook, customer support, app manuals, design documents per project, etc. The possibilities are endless and having them separately helps with security between different roles in the company and outside of it.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Finest Documentation platform

Confluence gave better documentation compared tot he old text files so that more readable format. The integration of images and diagrams make the documentation more user friendly.

Pros

Confluence gives best documentation platform for your projects. We can categorize based on different projects and sub projects. we can create links to another pages which is very useful to route to another document without searching for it. we can see all the documents related one project in one section. It gives you wide range of features to include images and diagrams to make the documentation more useful. We can also subscribe to the pages so that anyone make any changes we get notified.

Cons

Confluence needs more integration with the CICD tools available in the market to make more automated documentation. confluence needs to provide to create diagrams for documentation so that users dont need to go for external software for that.

Best documentation tool I ever used

I use this almos daily and I think it is a great tool for team performance. It allows to create and view all the info in no time and pretty well structured.

Pros

The main advantage about Confluence is that is part of the Atlassian Suite which involves Jira and Bitbucket among others. This makes pretty easy to integrate them and add quick references to a jira issue with just write the reference number. The text editor in Confluence is pretty complete, allowing to create really decent pages for any kind of documentation desired. The possibility of create nested pages makes really easy to organize the information in "chapters" "sub-chapters" and so on, giving your documentation a really neat look. This feature also allows to segregate the information, so you can have your product's documentation on one place, perfectly organized and set another "Chapter" for your team info, where you could store info about code conventions, timetables about overtime or availability, and so on. Confluence is also useful in order to create software designs, since it allows to create pages where you can paste your diagrams and so on and allows to discuss on them by adding comments or remarks. And the Watch utility keep you posted via e-mail whenever a page you're watching is modified in any way so you can keep track of a discussion or whatever.

Cons

So far didn't find any big issue with confluence. Maybe for beginners it has a bit of learning curve and some option like the page nesting and so on is a bit difficult to learn. Besides that, I think is a pretty complete software. Something I miss is the possibility of "downloading" a page with all nested ones into a pdf. That would be a great feature in order to generate documentation files.

Powerful wiki software

Confluence has become the place for us to collect information, across our business. We use it document our processes and policies (the access controls prove useful there), and our development teams use it on a daily basis to record the outcomes of discussions and to share knowledge.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Wiki Engine on Steroids

We are using Confluence as our internal documentation storage system. It allows us to easily create documentation and share it among our various teams while controlling access to the teams. It is better than a document storage system for this purpose, as it allows us to create the documents on the fly, cutting a step out of the process and making documents easier to manage. We host it on site, so it is more secure than a solution like Google Docs as it's not on the web.

Pros

We use Confluence on a daily basis to document various aspects of our organization. There is a large variety of built-in templates for a variety of sorts of documents. We heavily utilize the how-to articles to record procedures. Although it does link with other Altassian products, like Jira, we don't use that functionality currently as we run Confluence on-site and Jira in the cloud. The upgrade to version 6 greatly increased the usefulness of the product, as it brought in concurrent editing, ala Google Docs, which was functionality we needed when developing procedures for an event as a group. The search and indexing capabilities make it easy to find a document if its location is not obvious.

Cons

Search and indexing can lose usefulness in the event you have many similar documents, like say a checklist that is executed often. I would like a function to be able to click a check box to "ignore results like this." The initial setup of Confluence was not completely straightforward, however, we were installing on an older version, version 5. (The upgrade to version 6 went much smoother.) I would prefer an omnibus install package if it doesn't currently have that rather than having to install PostgreSQL and the application. The LDAP integration could have been a little bit smoother than it was, although it is in line with the other Atlassian products I have integrated.

An excellent documentation service that has saved me on many occasions

My coworker and I use confluence extensively to document all of the work that we perform. As IT staff many issues that we come across will be repeated ad-infinitum. As such to simply be able to look up the fix from any location with internet access increases efficiency many times over. The notification ability helps all users to see what has been changed, when, and by whom providing an excellent level of accountability.

Pros

It is extremely easy to create a large number of documents, it is possible to reference other documents within them to facilitate ease of research, and documents can all be put into sub-folders to contain them within separate trees to aid with organisation. The mobile app is extremely useful for reading documentation whilst on the go - an example would be that we keep Video Conference details on one page that I have favorited, as such when I set up a VC from any location I am able to rapidly find the correct details to dial. The search functionality allows for extremely quick location of relevant documents. On many occasions I have not been able to find what I need looking through the lists, only to immediately find it on the first search. Indeed I no longer look through the list as the search is so efficient. When changes are made to documents it is possible to set it up to notify other members of the team so that they are able to see what has been done.

Cons

The only minor issue I have discovered with confluence is that when creating new documents setting the location is not as smooth as I would like. Specifically I need to begin creating the document, then select "Move" and finally put it into the desired place. This does not really cause issues as it is still a quick process, however a one click setup would be appreciated.

Helpful Tool

Overall I would recommend using Confluence, but would caution people on how they rollout the new platform to their company. Ensuring that the expectations are communicated clearly for how the platform will be used, by whom and the frequency, are very helpful things to communicate when preparing your team to switch.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Perfect solution for interaction within our dev team and also for interaction between us & customers

I absolutely love the product. It is awesome. When your con list is made up of feature requests, you know the product is intensely used and you are looking for "more" or adjusting how things are done to help enable you to do your task, plus add functionality that would provide value for the product. This product is a 10 of 10 if you are using it right.

Pros

The widgets. I love the team calendars, the roadmap functionality for time lines, decision tracking and criteria, tasks/action items and the ease of defining them, status bars, and the flexibility for meeting notes, how to articles, blogs, file lists, product requirements, retrospectives, task reports, and troubleshooting articles from one source. It has really improved our interaction with customers for projects and documentation.

Cons

From time to time I see issues with editing pages. It does not make the bold or color changes to changes even though the toolbar indicates it is made, it does not display correctly. I also see this display issue with tasks, where the tool bar indicates a task is inserted, but it is not displaying correctly. And also see this issue with bullets. It will display no bullet, or even worse, it displays additional bullets that I don't want. I would also love to be able to sync widgets between pages (ie a status bar on one page to a parent of that page for a summary. And also be able to sync components/pieces of a page between two Confluence instances. For an example of the use case, we have a time line that we maintain on an internal instance, and I want to sync parts of that timeline to an external instance that we share with customers. This would allow me to have internal only deliverables mapped, but provide a customer facing doc without maintaining two versions

Confluence for Team collaboration

My overall business experience is great. Earlier team was sharing project content via emails that is a clumsy way to mamage and store the information, but as more and more people are using confluence it has become a repository and one stop shop to put knowledge at one palce which can be referred as and when needed. This is a great tool and a game changer for how we manage our collaboration within team for the project under Agile way

Pros

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

Cons

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.

It should be taken seriously

As I mentioned before, I use it as a company wide manual where all employees have to leaf through it whenever they have a question on a certain procedure and if they have any changes they'd like to make to any old methods then they are encouraged to make the edits to keep the company knowledge up to speed.

Pros

Confluence is great for creating company manuals or documenting company procedures. Think of it as a formal business blog or a wiki where you can keep a record of anything from basic tables outlining company info to company policies which can then be shared with the rest of the employees so that they can in turn, learn and input their own observations and knowledge. It organizes the pages for you and it makes it easy for anyone to search, edit and add new pages to keep the knowledge growing. At my company, we use it as a manual and all new employees have to read through it as part of their training. It allows you to add photos or videos to document special past events or to just simply make the page more interesting. The formatting ribbon looks similar to Microsoft word's so if you have experience with using a Word document then it should be no problem using the different types of formating options and if you have no experience then you'll get the hang of it pretty soon as it's fairly easy to deduce what each button does. I love how it is able to save any edits you make to a page and it doesn't publish it until you are ready so you are able to make new pages and edit old ones at your own pace and once you are done you can click on "publish". It alows you to restrict what other people can and cannot edit, it sends notifications to those who have a user in your account. I would recommend it.

Cons

The interface could use more color or some pizzazz as it looks pretty dull and it reminds me of an electric appliance manual: gray and boring to the point that you feel like throwing it away but then you are too afraid to do so because you may never know when you might need it. But then again, I use it as a company manual so I can't do much there, I'm guessing if you want something prettier then go get a blogging account but Confluence gets straight to the point and it should be taken seriously.

One of the greatest tools to collaborate and build project knowledge base

Pros

A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plan to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location. The confluence editor feature makes it easier for me to create documents, review and share feedback and changes can be tracked thru page histories. Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users to navigate between pages and information. It is easy to build links within pages by adding an anchor. You don't need to remember which part of the page you have read a certain information and do page scroll. I like the gliffy plugin. Whenever I need to embed a workflow diagram, adding gliffy makes it easier to attach flowchart, it's dynamic as changes in the diagram is reflected in the page. I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them Documenting a test report is easier with the JIRA integration - JIRA issues highlighted and linked and JIRA issue filters can be embedded and since these two (JIRA and Confluence) work hand in hand, it makes delivering software in agile approach a lot easier.

Cons

To beautify your confluence page, you need to know which macros and plugins you need to add but by doing these, one needs to have very basic knowledge in html or programming which could be a learning curve to most people. But lots of how to videos are shared by Atlassian and lots of documented procedures are out there shared by experienced users. One just need to be resourceful. The challenges in embedding spreadsheet with macros and formatting tables are not a challenge anymore if you know what macro or plugin to use. Another issue is sometimes finding the information you are seeking is not successful and sometimes the information search for spans to multiple pages - but information actually can be managed by adding labels which again boils down to the user having the knowledge that this feature exists.

A robust and feature-rich collaboration/documentation software that sets the standard

The best wiki/collaboration/documentation software I've used professionally.

Pros

- Lots of visual tools for organizing information, as well as molding communications: gliffy diagrams, code blocks, cells, spreadsheets. - Permissions model for segmenting information is greatly useful for organizations that create lots of documents and require some controls on searching and access to documents based on role. - Web-based interface for administrators of Confluence is convenient for managing content, delegation and authorization work. - There are many free software solutions in this sector of software, but generally require significant development to provide the value and features offered by confluence out of the box. - Development and improvements continue to be deployed, Confluence has not been static - Add-ons available through Atlassian marketplace to allow for further feature-adds for organization needs. I work in an IT environment, and diagrams for networks, software, process flows are invaluable for documentation purposes. - Shortcut commands for savvy power users saves lots of time inserting tools and setting up formatting with ease, once you are aware them.

Cons

- Having used confluence for over 6 years, I have seen Confluence become more reliable with every update. At times, when something would go wrong with text formatting (bullet point indentation, for example), a power user could go to a tab of the document page you were working on, and edit the markup language of the page to correct the quirky formatting issue. This feature was removed. To the credit of Confluence, fixing such issues is less and less necessary, but power users like myself still miss it. - The permissions models can be confusing at times, even for highly technical people supporting the software. I do not think this is an issue with Confluence, but rather, a caution to administrators who approach permissions from different eco-systems.

Awesome

Company: Midsize Industry: Legal Documentation is my bread & butter and I have never used a better solution than Confluence. I also use JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, which taken all together amount to a mostly-seamless solution for all of my documentation needs!

Pros

With Confluence we have an environment that is very efficient to work in to add new content, very easy to update articles and manage file attachments. The keyboard shortcuts are second to none. It is an absolute pleasure to work in Confluence all day. Setting up spaces for various audiences, including a "personal space" allows me to draft documents privately and then move the document over into a space with an audience. Effectively I can "publish" content to employees with a couple of mouse clicks. Permissions are very well thought out. The permission scheme is based on spaces, individuals and groups, with flexibility from super-locked-down to wide open on the public internet. It allows control of various actions per person or per group, and affords us maximum utility of the product. People within the business are dreaming up different ways to use it faster than we can implement them. As with any full-featured system that allows you total control as an administrator, successful use of the product requires that you lay out your business requirements clearly first so that there are no unexpected outcomes. Establishing best practices for content creators within the system is also advisable. I have used other systems in the past, notably MediaWiki and SharePoint, and while I enjoyed them at the time, Confluence blows everything else out of the water. The control and flexibility is unparalleled and the product has obviously been designed for use in environments where project priorities, staff hierarchies, etc can experience rapid significant change. I also highly recommend the Atlassian sister product JIRA and add-on JIRA Service Desk for task based work management. It is incredibly useful.

Cons

With great power comes great responsibility and great potential to make an absolute mess of things. Deployment of this tool to a large user base would require some serious preparation to establish access schemes, permissions for user groups, best practices for editing and creating new content, and organizing content within the spaces. End user training is critical to cement those rules and establish a culture around using it effectively. I would not recommend deploying this tool in a slapdash hurry (Although, given it's innate flexibility, it would be easier to correct it later with Confluence than some of its competitors!)

Perfect for a knowledge repository

This is a software that serves well it purpose, really easy and quick to use and does the job very well. And the posibility of interaction with Jira and Bitbucket is a real advantage.

Pros

Being an Atlassian product it is fully compatible with the rest of the suite, and being used together with Jira and Bitbucket is a real hit. It allows to link a Jira task/bug/story/whatever by just writing the element reference number; it will automatically create a link to the real stuff on Jira. This makes easy to keep work briefs about epics and stories, so you can easily talk about when or where you fixed something, and just link the task in which you logged the work. Besides that is really flexible allowing to have multiple sub-level pages to properly organize the information in a much more structured way than a Wiki. This allows to keep software documentation, teams structure and oranization, meetings briefs, and so on in the same application but in a well structured and easy to use way. Regarding the usability, the text editor is quite complete, and allows to create very neat pages really fast. It supports images, tables, formatted text... everything you would need in a documentation app, is there.

Cons

For this software I have not found any serious cons... maybe something I would like to be changed is the placement of the save button. On that location I use to miss it and sometimes I just closed the page without saving because I forgot the button was there; but that is just my problem remembering things.

The quasi standard for organizational wikis

Building an overall wiki base was our main purpose and it worked well. We have been expanding it and documenting progress across a large team.

Pros

Confluence is easy to setup, maintain, and to use and allows many team members to contribute. The search function is pretty good and tagging and organizing works well. It's even possible to use it as a document rev system, though that stretches the functionality for larger projects.

Cons

Confluence is slow to implement new features that helps to speed up the workflow (i.e. copy and pasting works most of the time, but still has some issues). Formatting and arranging items on a page is sometimes difficult and frustrating and using it for documentation on paper often doesn't work well. Permissions are unfortunately difficult to implement and Atlassian is slow to acknowledge obvious shortcomings. You're also tied to them for a long time since exporting the knowledge base in an efficient manner is pretty much impossible.

The Perfect Internal Knowledge Database

When WikiSpaces recently reported that they were closing their service right after I purchased an annual membership, both myself and my employer was quite disappointing. AS a result I lost funding for our internal knowledge database (it was a pet project to improve my value to the company). As a result, I experimented with many different alternatives, and finally settled with Confluence. I have been so happy with it that I also use it for my own small businesses knowledge base. it is efficient, has a dedicated mobile app, full of features and integrations, and carries a very modern look.

Pros

An incredible amount of features and integrations. Confluence is able to easily communicate with Google apps, Microsoft Office programs, etc. It even includes it's own widgets for creating Gantt charts! The presentation is quite modern, and though I haven't dig into it yet, I've seen that there's also a theme system in place to change the appearance of the environment. Embedding pictures and diagrams are really easy and have enough options to get it to look the way you want. Confluence frequently has both minor and major updates, it can be kinda exciting to login on a Monday morning and see something new!

Cons

It would be nice to have some level of image editor native to the app, similar to what one has in WordPress. It seems to have everything but a proper footnote widget, something that I really favor in both my research and my workplace. With the frequent updates, also comes the chance that not everyone will appreciate the changes; I had been using the blog feature for a few months quite happily, but recently they changed a few of the features in the blog function to make it more mobile friendly. As a result I lost a few features that I favored. It did however improve over time and I got over the lost of those features.

The best tool for documentation

We went confluence when we had to share the workflows, test documentation, development documentation, important reads and links for new employees to get onboarded technically.

Pros

The ease of usage, diversification of the type of data that can be input, access control options. It was so easy to add flowcharts. If multiple people were editing the same document, the way it was handled is great!

Cons

The performance of the page load when there are diagrams and lots of text on a page was low. Less options to Export, like exporting to Excel is not present.

Powerful Wiki for any business need

If you are an organization that is planning to utilize Confluence and other Atlassian products, I would recommend introducing an administrator to this product. As the use of the product grows, not properly managing it can become more cumbersome than useful. This powerful tool can get out of control when not managed due to its enormous customization features and lack of understanding its features and functionalities across the enterprise.

Pros

Confluence is an Atlassian product that provides a very powerful Wiki platform for documentation. More than just a Wiki or Blog, Confluence is a collaborative tool with extensive customization features. You can control every aspect of Confluence, from its overall design and layout to permissions and properties. Confluence offers an online as well as a local server version, with minimal differences between their functionalities. Confluence has an extensive library of add-ons and integrations that expand the product's capabilities. Confluence provides shared work spaces as well as personal spaces and pages that allow users to manage content.

Cons

Not necessarily a con, but Confluence's extensive customization capabilities can often create a slight to challenging learning curve. This is why many organizations who rely heavily on this and other Atlassian products, often have administrators who tend specifically to the Atlassian suite.

My go to for collaboration

Pros

Confluence on the cloud is really easy to use. Non-technical people and technical people can easily figure it out. What I love about it is that it kinda of has a social media feel and but has all of the functionality to manage a Lean Agile project. The integration into the Google Suite of tools has brought some other key features like single sign on via Google Accounts which is kind of nice. Anything to battle security fatigue is a plus in my book. The cost is also really affordable for new businesses and start-ups and even personal projects. Why did I not use Confluence to plan my wedding?! Anyways,I digress..this is definitely one of my favorite collaboration tools out there and if you think you need to work together on a team doing MULTIPLE projects, Confluence is a must have.

Cons

I feel like every time I go in there, there is a new widget to use. There are so many of them that I don't have time to go through them all to find out if it is worth getting! Atlassian should consider sending "recommender" notifications of tools that might fit our needs based on our usage pattern. I'm not overly concerned about privacy here, but if there is a new widget that I don't know about I'd like at least a small tickler or notification to check it out.

Best wiki I've ever used

Widespread adoption. A wiki is only as good as the content you have in it and having an easy to use tool made people want to use it and create documentation.

Pros

I love the ease of use of the editor and the content management features. I fell in love as soon as I saw I could copy/paste screen shots directly in the editor - it's such a time saver for me. You can also re-organize your documents in a snap, drag-and-dropping through the hierarchical view or using the Move feature. Content reports let you create page lists on the fly with the information you want in them. Templates are awesome - you can use theirs, customize them and even create your own so that your content stays consistent even when multiple users are creating documents.

Cons

Most of the advanced features you need are available through paid-for add-ons. And still, I can't find a decent image management add-on. Also, when we had a few licences, the cost was negligible, but as the usage is growing, even though some of these add-ons are only used by a few users, we have to pay for the whole company. Finally, managing these add-ons as we upgrade Confluence versions is not always seamless. Some add-ons just stop working and aren't updated by the vendors, leaving us without the feature we've come to appreciate.

Good documentation and wiki tool

Easy project tracking, effective documentation and the ability to have integration with other tools are some of the good features that I like in Confluence.

Pros

It is designed well and is helpful is storing team tracking and information documentation. Confluence acts as our central repository and acts as the wiki for projects across various departments to document a project starting from design to implementation and maintenance. Any document/task could be properly managed to editing features for the team and a history of changes that are made to keep track of the iterative updates that are made on a document. Also, integration with other Atlassian tools like JIRA is very useful to tracking a feature from difference perspectives and keeping everyone aligned within the team on the current status and next steps.

Cons

Organization of the pages can be improved as it is sometimes not straightforward to find content related to a particular project or task. Also, the inline editing tools for a document could be enhanced as you end up relying on macros and other tools very often to be able to properly structure and format a confluence page. Searching the documents is not very easy and it is sometimes difficult to find the right content when needed.

Sensational Collaborative Tool

Our project team had a need for a collaborative environment where members could share information to help educate one another. One key benefit I have come to realize is the ability to define permissions for which team members could access each page.

Pros

From the set up of a pages to creating the structure of a Confluence space, I have found Confluence to be incredibly easy to use. As part of the Atlassian suite, the integration with Jira is a great added bonus. The control panel makes for quickly formatting the rich text. One of my favorite parts is the customization of templates. The feature I have used most often is the recurring use of the customized Meeting Notes template. It has proved to be an effective means for presenting to meeting attendees what was discussed and decided upon. Relating to that is what I like to consider as a hidden gem of Confluence - the consolidation of the action items from different meetings.

Cons

There really isn't much. I guess one thing to call out would be around creating tables. It is very difficult to see the borders of the columns and rows. I find that I can struggle to know where to be entering the text within a cell. It was be nice if there were options to select the thickness of the lines.

Great application for IT professionals

My overall experience is quite a good one, helped me deliver some valuable pieces of information to different stakeholders in manners that they enjoy and understand.

Pros

I've been using Confluence to document different aspects related to IT projects for over two years. It's a great place to store the applications 'wiki' pages and share it away with different stakeholders. It's also easy to control who has viewing / editing rights, thus ensuring that only the right people can access different pages. It offers a great deal of widgets and tools that helps the user deliver pieces of information in a catchy way for the reader - has charts, tables and different ways of organizing the page. It enables integration with other applications many IT professionals may use, thus exporting analytics or other relevant data is really easy.

Cons

It's the type of application that's easy to get into and hard to master. Setting it up the first time may not be the easiest thing but once it's done it usually works flawlessly. Also, as a new user it's sometimes hard to see all the functionalities that are offered by Confluence and some digging into documentation or looking at other projects may give some insights.

Great product for documentation

Pros

This product is great for documentation and sharing information. I do a lot of training documentation and Confluence is a great place to store the information. Anyone in our company can easily access the information through a link. Because it is online the information in the training materials is always up to date; we don't have to worry about someone having an outdated version of the document. In addition, Confluence allows for screenshots to be easily added, which is awesome, and it automatically resizes them, which is amazing. You can also add grids (which isn't Confluence's strong suit but still a nice feature) and Table of Contents and many more features. In addition, you do get to keep Revision History in Confluence so if you change something and need to reference an old version of the document you still can. And, you can change the access different people have so some people can edit the document and others can only view, or some can't view at all.

Cons

The software was a little confusing to learn to use. Now that I know how to use it, it is easy, but we did have to have some training. While others are learning it they aren't using it much because it is kind of foreign to them but if we could get past adoption issues the software would be a great help to us.

A complex platform - in all the right ways

With confluence, we have created a fantastic "KB" (Knowledge Base) forum for our business. It's a place to document processes, link to useful software, and it ultimately makes work and collaboration easier.

Pros

Confluence has so many layers of security and permission structures that you'll never accidentally let someone see a page they shouldn't. Once set up properly, it's an amazing way to collaborate! The sheer number of customization plugins and add-ins really lets you make it your own.

Cons

The difficulty of getting it running on your own server and making it work initially. Confluence has good documentation, but it's still a fairly difficult implementation. There are some slightly confusing licensing models, too.

Confluence - A truly collaborative application.

Overall, I highly recommend Confluence for any organization that is looking for collaborative software. It is extremely useful and easy to learn.

Pros

Confluence is incredibly easy to use. It is designed to be a collaborative tool, to share information (wiki-style), documents, photos, etc. Our organization has been stuck on SharePoint for so long that there are documents for days upon years stacked up in unused libraries. Confluence has been a lifesaver for us by allowing us to rid the libraries of these outdated documents and placing the content we need access to right there on the page. If a template is needed, we can add that template to the page for download. We can link to other Confluence pages for additional or related information and build child pages to help dive deeper into a topic. We also utilize JIRA for our ticketing system and since Confluence and JIRA are both owned by Atlassian, we can integrate metrics, reporting, dashboards, and other information from JIRA in a way that is consumable within Confluence. We also can add Tableau reports, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Adobe PDFs, etc. It works extremely well with other applications.

Cons

My least favorite part about Confluence is its limited page customization from a font and color perspective. It will also only allow up to three columns and other formatting limitations. There might be macros to overcome this, but that is also frustrating. Macros have been built to "fix" things within Confluence by hundreds (if not thousands) of other individuals and companies. Many sell those macros and varying costs. It has forced us as an organization to maintain a dev environment just to ensure that a macro that we bring in isn't malicious. Confluence's base macros are extremely basic and sometimes not very useful.

Great for team collaboration and information sharing within an organization!

Confluence is great for presenting data and information for other users on the team to see, but can be a struggle to customize or format in the way you want.

Pros

Confluence is very easy to use. Within the company, we use Confluence for creating guides, work instructions, and capturing other forms of data in spaces that we can organize. Everyone on the team has the ability to modify pages, adding their own inputs, or making comments. The tool supports a few useful methods of formatting information: tables, images, code snippets, and the usual rich text formatting styles. There are various addons that expand Confluence's basic functions. Confluence and JIRA can work together and you are able to add JIRA links or view JIRA field data directly from Confluence. It is easy to draft pages without publishing them until ready. The tool also has many other features for customizing your spaces, from page layouts to color schemes, but my company has these options limited to admin users only.

Cons

As much as it is great to enter information on pages in a very presentable manner, text formatting can be very frustrating. When you are on a bulletted list and want to remove the bullet from the next text line, it often also affects the previous line. It is the same thing for bolding or indentations, text isn't often treated as per line but sort of in groups of lines that I haven't been able to figure out. It is certainly not as easy as writing things out within a Word document or other word formatting tool.

Confluence the wiki for your projects

With Confluence we sold a big problem in the project data collection. Now with confluence we (as a company) are able to collect and store all the critical projects informations

Pros

Confluence is the tool that allow you and your colleague to communique and collect all the project informations. The things that i like the most is versatility in the project structure creation and the ability to create and share very complex pages. We use confluence daily on different level of the organization from the management to the clients project

Cons

The thing that I dislike the most is the page editor but don't despair with the new redesign they rethink from the ground up all the content creation experience so for now I don't have a real cons.

Great software for both internal- and external-facing documentation

Confluence is a more than capable page for generating support documentation.

Pros

I liked that Confluence is really easy-to-use. A GUI editor means that you can just write things down even if you don't have any background in markdown. Inserting screen captures into your documentation pages is also easy, as all you have to do is copy, then drop the captures into the page, without needing to save them beforehand. Confluence has everything my team needs for coming up with comprehensive support documents. There are also many third-party plugins you can use for your documents, e.g. for generating PDF copies and formatting print-friendly pages.

Cons

Although the GUI editor is cool, at times, particularly when I want to customize a page, it's also its biggest drawback. You can't customize the page at all. Moreover, there are times when Confluence takes too long a time to load. Lastly, although documentation is comprehensive, at times, you have to do a lot of digging before you can find the appropriate support page for a feature. This might be because of the software's broad list of features. Many of the third-party plugins are also quite expensive.

Not just another knowledge base

Overall, Confluence has improved communication between our business analysts and developers. It has also helped us to better embrace documentation for our products and helped us with project management and issue tracking.

Pros

You can create a page in seconds. Its super easy to pull your Jira issues onto pages in Confluence. There are great templates that help you follow best practices for project documentation and great plugins that help you with things like mockups.

Cons

The administration piece is a little challenging if you have not received any training on it. I feel like the user management and some of the other configuration settings could be improved upon.

Great intranet & documentation tool

Overall, great tool for a business if you need to organize your documentation and keep the workflow clean.

Pros

We use Confluence at our workplace to organize and store all the documentation, PRDs, plans and calendars in one system, and have quick access to everything whenever we need it. So far it has worked great for me. I like how flexible and highly functional the page system and editing is and how you can use the calendars to keep everyone in the loop. I use the option of embedding the Jira tasks on the pages a lot and it is very convenient when you can link pages to issues, have the status displayed in real time and open the issue youre interested in in just one click. The commenting under the pages allows everyone to interact and communicate without interfering with the page content. The new design of the page editor is very sleek and adds more tools for structuring your documentation.

Cons

I find the page ordering & settings a bit clunky at times. It is also a bit inconvenient when two or more people work on the same page at the same time, there is no auto save mode as in, say, Google docs, so whenever any of users clicks on publish the page is published as it is at the moment, not taking into account any of the changes that might be made as it is being published.

Confluence Review

We solved myriad of business problems with Confluence, but chief among them was categorizing and organizing tasks and results for not only our group, but for other groups and our teams to see. For us, it was a place to digitally house relevant documentation of everything from the start and progress of projects to meeting agendas and meetings. It served as an online hub for our documents and activities, freeing up room from our servers and local drives.

Pros

What I like most about Confluence is the transparency and visibility it gives to other members of your team so they can keep track of what's going on. I like that we can post information to Confluence, have ownership and have accountability applied to the user. Everything is documented and it's an easy-to-use format.

Cons

What I liked least about Confluence is that it takes a while to figure out how to use it effectively. And there isn't a lot of support for user's to find solutions. It usually helps if someone on your team or in your workplace is familiar with Confluence and can walk you through it. Designating groups, uploading and categorizing information and tagging the right people for the right context was a struggle for me at first, but I figured it out.

Documentation Basics

We've used this for some time because it just works. That said administering it has been somewhat frustrating at times due to us not having a developer on staff. Doing anything with the tool other than building spaces and pages will require some time investment and some very strong guidline adherence from your documentation editors and contributors in order to 'work'. For us, it hasn't been working, we need more structure and will therefore likely leave the product behind soon.. But this tool absolutely has its place for many scenarios.

Pros

Confluence makes for a great entry point into getting a Knowledge Base or even an environment of communication in your business. Creating pages is simple and with lots of features its easy to get them looking very presentable. Some built in templates help get you thinking like you need to in creating an organized environment that is easy to surf and find what you need. An advanced back-end makes it so you can develop if that's your thing. Not to mention the ability to host yourself with the myriad bonus' that that comes with.

Cons

Time: If you need advanced layout and/or don't have the first clue in how to structure your environment this tool may not be for you.

A multifunctional wiki system, but not a storage repository

If you are looking for a way to collaborate better, Confluence will provide you with all the necessary features for this. Definitely, Confluence deserves to be recommended thanks to its high level of productivity, multifunctionality, and ease of use.

Pros

The abilities provided by Confluence to work with documents and other content are incredible. It is a pretty simple action to attach various types of documents, as well as track, look them through, and search the necessary ones. The latter is available due to the possibilities of the advanced programs search system as well. Apart from this mentioned functionality, our company also likes the security level of Confluence, its administrative and management features, and powerful configuration capabilities.

Cons

We like how powerful Confluence is as a wiki system. However, this product is not a storage repository at all. That is why our employees and clients of our services are sometimes confused because of the constant need to switch between different platforms. It may be really hard to figure out which solution should be preferred in every particular case (for instance, SharePoint or Atlassian Confluence). Otherwise, we do not have any other serious drawbacks we have found about Confluence to share with potential users of the solution.

Confluence Software Review

Overall I will recommend this and really it will help you to organize your project

Pros

It's very good alternative for SharePoint sites in terms of its look and UI which is user friendly. It has more options to design your pages for any information you can share with team and also I like the 'watch me' feature which will not full your inbox unnecessarily based on your watch me preference. I loved working with it and created many art icles and how to do information with hyperlinks on it. Also it's connectivity with JiRa really helps us to go directly to our Sprint stories with single sign on

Cons

It should have Auto update on the Jira from confluence. Also for first time user its little difficult to understand how to create pages and navigate to desire path. It should have some guidelines in pictorial ways . Also if therw is any possibility of integration with automation tools like UFT it will good

Using this software from last 4 years. It's simple, easy to understand and user friendly.

I have prepared lot of documents related to my project and placed those at Confluence. Shared the link to those documents within my team. Anyone who need it simply download it from that location. Also downloaded lot of documents from confluence which helped me to understand the project. No need to approach different people for the documents.

Pros

1. It is a centralized location to store documents at organization or personal level which can be easily available around the globe. 2. Simple and user friendly interface. No special training is required to understand the tool. 3. Use to track your daily activities like meetings, scrums happening at organization level which can be easily monitor by higher authority through this tool. 4. Easily can be linked with Jira. 5. Notification functionality is one of the strong feature present in the tool. Team will get notification through mail if some update the page.

Cons

1. Searching the document is bit difficult if someone forget the name of the document. 2. Don't have the option to chat with colleagues at organization level . 3. It's not free. User has to pay to get the license.

Confluence: the documentation dominator!

Confluence is our documentation heavy-hitter. And we don't just use it as a system of record, but we also use it to share information cross-company. In almost all instances it has replaced the need for emails, shared drives, and online documents! It's nice having everything (securely) in one place, right at your fingertips.

Pros

In the hectic world we live in today, it seems like a bigger challenge to take a few beats to write things down. My team has become a champion of documentation, but often the larger issue is overlooked: where will this documentation live so that it is accessible and can continue to evolve?! Confluence was the perfect solution!! We have paved the way on the documentation frontier and the rest of the organization has finally jumped on board. Confluence not only allows for cross-team collaboration, but it's a magnificent way to organize and share documentation.

Cons

You really need a game plan when organizing your documentation in how Confluence sets up the hierarchies and the rich text editor format may take a little to get used to if you are coming from other documentation products.

You pay the premium but you get the best

I have created and managed years-long projects in Confluence, involving over 100 users. I have trained users on how to use Confluence. People that are not so savvy with technology might struggle a little bit with Confluence. Confluence does have amazing documentation on the tool, as well as a very helpful community. What I also suggest is, if you are the administrator of the tool, is to do "Confluence 101" webinars to the users and record it as well. You can then upload that recording into confluence itself, on a "how to" section, where you can also small short videos on where to find certain things in Confluence, or do certain tasks, and when you send users the invite to join Confluence you can simply ask then to check those videos as a first step.

Pros

Most complete collaboration software out there. It does 99% of want you might want to do. The other 1% are still achieved but slightly different than you might expect.

Cons

No red flags in this product. The learning curve is a little but step. But I guess that comes with any software that is so complete and powerful. I think that based on all the capabilities of this tool, it's relatively easy to use after you have spent a couple of days going through it.

A very useful tool for managing the complete knowledge repository and team-management information.

There are quite a few business problems that we solve using Confluence, the most important one is team collaboration. with confluence our team can collaborate and share information and documents with ease. We can archive information, we can add information to confluence and every stakeholder will be notified about any updates etc which is quite useful in a high-demand scenario as ours. Another business problem that we solve using confluence is progress tracking and reporting by integrating it with Jira.

Pros

The way we can organize the information and the complete knowledge repository is pretty good. Here we can manage all the data with ease and in properly organized manner. The searching of any information is quite easy. Another good factor is its various integrated tools like I can manage a team calendar here, make various add-ons and integrate it with Jira etc which is quite useful for us.

Cons

Some of the things which I dislike is its Page-Tracking. Sometimes we have seen that the page tracking doesn't work pretty well. Another thing which makes me uneasy is its formatting of pages which is trivial at times and I cannot add much graphics

Use of Confluence for Knowledgebase and QMS

Despite off-the-shelf options, we built our Quality Mgmt System using Confluence. Best feature is the ability to collaboratively share documents. Advantages of this over our previous method (shared directory on server): 1. No out of sync document instances. There is one instance with the ability to post live excerpts or link to the document elsewhere. When the document is revised, shared content is also. 2. Ability to search all document content. 3. Group memberships can be granted to users in a simple way, allowing for reviewing assignments, permissions, targeted content, and task lists. 4. A variety of macros allowed many additional features within our local instance (self-hosted). These include: a read confirmation macro (to record employees keeping up to date on required procedures), a document approval macro with configurable workflows (the basis for our document change/review procedure), page attachments (that allows related documents to be stored on summary pages), a reporting macro that automatically creates summary table on parent pages in a tabular form of their child pages, and a very simple flow charting macro (Gliffy) that is fairly powerful. The downside is that the editor is a bit buggy (with numbered/bulleted lists) and plays differently in different browsers. It appears to be the most stable in Chrome, but a feature allowing editing in place of MS Office documents is only functional in IE. The WYSIWIG editor is fairly light without a lot of format options (for some this turns out to be fairly economical and is a much simpler user interface than Office products). Frustratingly, I have been dumped out of pages or have had them lock up. I'm also very frustrated with the documentation available (core product and macros). Although the feature descriptions vary from OK to mediocre, my issue is the lack of application examples. Without examples, one is left to a trial-and-error approach. I have truly hated this! Once the concepts are learned, it does seem fairly straightforward. For this reason, I rated ease of use as 4/5 even though I very much like the product and gave it 5/5. I haven't used customer service, so no rating. As a part-time QMS manager wanting to get others involved in the shared management of our system and its documents, I've been very happy with our choice. Where other QMS software may have worked out of the box without development, I don't believe that they would have been as collaborative as our Confluence based system.