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.

Very flexible collaboration tools

Main issue that we have solved with this software is, sharing and giving access of document to certain user from various department. It help to protect the document and it will give insight if the document has been edited and the editor of the document.

Pros

I really like that Confluence is very flexible in managing collaboration of documentation and task. Creating a document and stored it in the cloud storage provided by this platform make the sharing process of the document is very easy and flawless and the document will only circulated inside the software which add more security to the document.

Cons

The only thing that i have problem with this software is, the full text search is not properly constructed. Too many unrelated search result is returned and that mean it is not accurate. I need to scan the result manually to find the document that i need and that action is taking time and slowing me down.

Great documentation tool in conjunction with JIRA

I have had an overall good experience with Confluence and it is easy to create and share documents. If you are using JIRA already I would recommend this.

Pros

Confluence allows me to easily create documentation on projects that we also have in JIRA (And also content we want to collaborate on as a company)

Cons

It gets increasingly more expensive as you add more users. The learning curve to use is relatively high. The interface is not intuitive

Practical Option for Atlassian Users

When paired directly with JIRA, the Confluence platform can be a very powerful tool in terms of organizing project documentation with active or archived projects. Unlike other JIRA add-ons, the ability to activate or deactivate the product at the individual user level makes it much more affordable and a solid value option. As a standalone product, however, Confluence falls shorts in terms of features and user interface when compared to other word processors or document cloud storage systems.

Pros

Confluence is a great option for existing Atlassian users looking to seamless integrate an active knowledge base into their project workflow. With direct connection to the JIRA project management platform, Confluence allows you to connect existing users directly to relevant project documentation. Its base functionality is fairly intuitive for novice users, and its advances permissions schemes allow you to create a variety of admin tiers that can restrict access to relevant users only. The integration between Confluence and JIRA is as simple as checking a box in the user admin panel.

Cons

As a general word processor, Confluence can be a little clunky when compared to the UX of similar processors such as Word of Google Docs. While its advanced features can be very useful for more experienced users, available tutorials can be difficult to come by and are often outdated. Like most Atlassian products, the bounty of features, settings, and schemes can be very overwhelming to the average user and are not overtly intuitive. Document organization can also be very confusing, as there are a variety of options to choose from when creating parent and child pages.

Class-enterprise knowledge base software

The best thing I achieved using this software was to integrate the concept of knowledge base with my business logic, and it really helped because they have a great documentation for starters, and they don't just learn to use the platform, but the overall concept regarding documentation management.

Pros

The best feature that this has is the extended Add-In marketplace. You can find the proper Add-In to express your ideas in the best way: Coding, Images or illustrations, animated gifs or videos, and even forms inside the documents and pages. From a user perspective, this is one on the easiest knowledge base software in the market, and also you have the bakcing of Atlassian. The process of the integration with our existing business logic was easy because we didn't have a strict knowledge base, but Confluence gave us the foundations to build one from scratch.

Cons

The export tools and options you have inside the platform are not good. The data isn't portable, so you can't migrate easily to another platform in case you want. The installation process was complex, but today, they stopped producing self-hosted applications, so you are obligated to use their cloud services, and it can be a problem if the company has a strict data policy, like restrictions in the phisycal storage of the data.

Best knowledge management and wiki out there

If you use other Atlassian products, Confluence is the perfect complement. Because exporting documents is so bad, it works best if you, your colleagues and your stakeholders/clients all exist in the same Atlassian ecosystem.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

A must have documentation tool

I spend on an average at least 3-4 hours on confluence everydays since past 6 years. It has become one of the most essential tool for us.

Pros

I have been using confluence since past 8 years where I have used it as a user, managed it and also deployed it in several organizations. Confluence really changed the game of documentation and has helped teams build internal documentation in no time. Confluence cloud allows to make the documentation space more scalable. The solution is so popular it can be integrated with most of the solutions.

Cons

The customer support is not the best as Atlassian reliés more on the community support.

All infromation and knowledge in one platform

Confluence help us to organized our company technical document in single place and easily search it back by using the text search. It is basically the wikipedia for our documentation.

Pros

Documentation and document storing & sharing with Confluence is really well organized and manageable. Keeping technical documentation is a critical for us to have a fast response when error happens and we will have all the data and information by easily using the full text search. It has a customized storage drive that can expended with additional cost.

Cons

They should change and update the software layout, it is outdated and confusing to find a specific tools that i need. There are some service integration that i need to be link with this software, but unfortunately it is not supported and i had to change to other service to make it work with Confluence.

Useful for a large organization

This is the best documenting tool I have used but I think it could be a bit better. It allows documenting and sharing between many collaborators, who need to be careful so things do not get messy (I wish Confluence did it by itself somehow). Sometimes it takes a bit too long to load.

Pros

Confluence is definitely a good documenting tool. For large organizations, it helps with the documentation, that can be shared easily. It allows linking different documents, so that's very good when documenting many pieces of the same project. It includes a very useful search bar

Cons

You can get easily lost if people in the organization are messy. Sometimes it is not easy to navigate through all the pages

Awesome for collaboration

Overall I have been happy with the ease of setup and document Management. Some simple features like table filtering could be useful rather than purchasing add one.

Pros

Three collaborative way it allows everyone to view and work on one document. The integration with Jira has been instrumental in allowing our projects to keep a track of issues relating to documentation.

Cons

I don't enjoy the fact that everytime I need a feature that isn't part of confluence I have to pay more money.

Documentation Resource and Sharing

Confluence is a nice tool to keep documentation organized as long as you remember where you're putting it (bookmarks). The tool is not sophisticated enough to provide ease of mind but it does provide a place to store documentation and the ability to share it or set permissions to intend on the correct people to view the items. Overall I as well as others use it but its also not the best and we all know it can be loads better in terms of features and formatting.

Pros

The rich text central location of document storage and the ability to share based on permissions is a nice-to-have tool for large companies or groups. Utilization is tricky as every team or group will use it in their own way and organize their own way so even if you implement this in your company and you're browsing another department's documentation, you will find essentially that it is just their own internal documentation which requires a little bit of a lucky search to find what you're looking for. Essentially this is a glorified document cloud storage which allows version control, permissions, and sharing.

Cons

It is not much different than say any other software or tool available in this category. It has some nice features like version control and seeing a complete history of who made changes to what along with comments and a social feature to it where you can subscribe but honestly there is so much more potential here especially from a company like Atlassian. I just feel they really dropped the ball here by not implementing better integration with some other apps which are already available. Example is that their spreadsheet implementation is a nightmare. The formatting almost always behaves irradicably and it has the bare minimum when it comes to these spreadsheets. Why not implement at least at the base of other offerings? For a paid product, the level of quality is expected to be much more.

Confluence: the hub for knowledge management

Overall, I use Confluence every day in my work to keep my (and my organization's) knowledge base relevant. I use to it to collaborate with other employees for improving internal processes, as well as for communicating important current info (such as outages or key developments). Confluence is unmatched in its search functionality, and allows my organization to keep its knowledge base completely streamlined.

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Easy and Simple Enterprise knowledge base and document management system

Confluence is really good for organizing all of your company/teams requirements related to content, document, knowledge management and file management. Its a must for any company which is dependent on content and content based activities.

Pros

From the word go, our team was able to jump start and create a solid knowledge base for our entire enterprise. Being in Education and E-Learning domain - content is the heart of our business. Managing content created by various teams inside company, partner contributions, freelancers content is extremely crucial and critical. Some of the most important features of this product for us are: Document Management, Knowledge base, Version Control System, Structured Pages, Search

Cons

Confluence product does content related work really well. But that's not enough as we have grown in last 3 years and so are our requirements. Integrations with forms, data collections, Kanban board, tasks etc have become kind of a must rather than good to have features. We are currently on the premium plan and $10 per user for just managing document and collaboration seems little too much, specially when there are products which provide much more for less.

I highly recommend this product for all corporate companies.

Overall I'm very happy with this product, without confluence it's impossible to maintain the knowledge article in our team. It helps everyone across the team. Thanks to the confluence team for such a wonderful product.

Pros

It comes with rich features, below are a few features which I personally liked: 1. Documentation: When there are some important knowledge articles that need to be shared with the team, we use this tool. It comes with multiple options to make the page feels catchy and rich, it also allows us to attach the images. 2. Search Functionality: When there are 1000s of confluence pages, and if I want to access the page containing a specific word or a line, the search engine works like a champ it finds the pages almost immediately, this feature really helps me in easing my office work. 3. It displays the name of the person who had created the page and last modified person name, this helps to know whom to reach out to when we need additional info pertaining to the details as written on the page. And if required we can add the approvals, thus whenever someone edits the document without your consent changes won't reflect others until you approve the updates. 4. Like and Comments: Similar to social media, readers can either hit like if they like the content or they can mention their feedback in the comment section, this feature really helped me while suggesting something to the author or express my thanks via a LIKE.

Cons

There should've been an option to keep the page in draft before publishing it. But unfortunately, there is no such feature in confluence. Apart from this, I didn't find any other flaws in the software.

Jira is incomplete without confluence!

Overall, I am very satisfied with the confluence. Multiple architects collectively decided to use that over Sharepoint. The key reason is the seamless integration between these two products (Jira and Confluence). For an example, by simply writing the issue key on confluence page would automatically create the link to Jira ticket while reflecting the status of the ticket. This would allow visibility for Release Planning, while allowing you to write an appropriate decisions such as Go-No-Go on the same page.

Pros

Confluence offers pretty good UI for creating excellent documents (requirements or design). It does support pretty much all features of Microsoft word for creating a great documentation. Between all Atlasssian products, if you are tight on budget, I would suggest you to get Jira and confluence combo. It’s indeed great tool combo for the remote agile teams to work together due to their seamless integration.

Cons

One thing that I loved on the share point that’s not great with confluence is integration with the Microsoft office products. To be very frank, I feel this is not a big drawback as now a days, web interface is pretty much replacing the traditional interface.

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 don’t 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 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.

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.

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.

Documentation is key and Confluence is the perfect place for it

My overall experience with Confluence is excellent. My team has been using confluence for over 5 years now and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We have built an extensive knowledge base in Confluence and keep learning more and more awesome features every day.

Pros

What I liked most and like most about Confluence is recently the ability to inline edit with team members on the same page. You can collaboratively edit a page together. This is very helpful when in meetings with multiple people and they can all be updating their portion of the document at the same time without stepping on anyone's changes. Second to that I would have to say the quick commands to change headers or add lists to a document on the fly never having to move your hands from the keyboard.

Cons

The thing I would say I liked the least about Confluence is it's API, while there is extensive documentation for it. When you are new to working with their API it can be very hard to get off the ground running without a lot of trial and error due to the lack of examples.

Great For Internal (Technical) Documentation

Confluence helped our team docuemnt our processes and compile our technical documentation and scripts in a central location. Confluence makes it easy to create and share a document, and also update docuemtnatiion and alert 'watchers' (those tied to a page) whenever changes are made. The ability to link articles to JIRA helps tie technical issues to real problems that were solved. Confluence is very feature rich and takes some time to learn, but it is worth the investment. I look forward to keep using it to help keep us organized!

Pros

The thing that I like most about Confluence is that I can create linked set articles in order to maintain technical documentation, which can be distributed across a wide range of teams and departments easily using the built-in shared features. The tools make it easy to embed pages within a page in order to create easy to follow guides. The ability to use tables and pictures helps a lot as well, and they're a lot of add-ins that can be used, such as code blocks!

Cons

If not set-up well, the organization of a workspace can get out of hand, making articles very hard to find. It is paramount to have a plan when creating pages and documents. There are not a lot of custom formatting options, and as far as I can tell, no way to automatically create a table of contents for a page, which would be a huge benefit.

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.

Amazing Tool for Documentation and Integration

The seamless integration with different products makes this application extremely desirable for us. If you are using other Atlassian products like Jira, Trello, then Confluence is an amazing solution for bringing all tools together. As you start building your documentation on confluence, you will love this tool even more. Most Importantly, you can integrate confluence page creation from your Jenkins Pipeline using the extensive API support they have.

Pros

After using this software for more than 18 months, I can definitely say, this is a great tool for technical documentation. It provides with easy setup, multiple project spaces for different teams, amazing API's to create pages remotely from different tools and last but not the least, simultaneous editing of the same document.

Cons

The only con I would say is it's Cost. It comes with an additional cost for every user who needs access, that racks up your monthly Atlassian bill pretty quickly. If you are not looking to spend the extra overhead, you should look at cheaper options.

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.

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.

Confluence

Using Confluence is helping our company by allowing developers & CSR's access these informational documents to solve customer issues and not have to dive thru from the beginning. It allows a starting point for support & if not found, to be able to create a new document for that specific issue.

Pros

We use this software to create manuals or just documents for product support, customer support & to troubleshoot easier and quicker with information entered by developers who have already corrected similar issues. We have different document libraries for parts of the company so each genre is easier found. We reference these instruction sets when solving issues previously encountered or when we have a new issue, then we create a new document and enter pertinent data, information & instructions on how to solve/correct the issue.

Cons

Confluence is dynamic enough for any company to set up for their needs. I was not on the team who did all of the setup, so I don't know how that was; I'm a user and have used it daily. The only thing I have found that seems a little weird is doing a search. You have to know the name of the document you are looking for or it may not turn up in the search correctly if you only put in part of the name. It would be very helpful to be able to put in a keyword to search for a document name to see how many for a topic is found.

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 ).

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.

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.

A nice tool for building, storing & maintaining a central knowledge-base

I've used Confluence (as a cloud solution - since on-premises licensing costs are significant) for a number of years and overall this is a great tool to use as a central point of information. In addition to technical and functional documentation we also use this to store the output of most of the SCRUM events (minutes, decisions and action items, etc.) Documentation can easily be added and maintained, the software supports page versioning and collaborative flows (creating drafts & publishing pages). Editing is done fairly easy, and embedding common objects (code snippets, images, external pages ) comes out of the box. As a note, some extra features (such as embedding SVG diagrams) require additional plugins (some of which have their own separate licensing) In our scenario, we've integrated with JIRA (another Atlassian tool for ticket & progress tracking) - integration is done fairly easy when all products are using the cloud-configuration. As a bonus, it also has a limited-functionality 10-users free plan - perfect for evaluating the product capabilities.

Pros

- Easy to use - Simple, wiki-style page structuring - Storing things together under one or more spaces allows building separate knowledge bases for multiple projects - Integrates nicely with other Atlassian products - Supports extension via plugins

Cons

- Migrating to something else is extremely tedious - Not-so-good when used as a DMS (document management system) - Some plugins require extra licensing (payable)

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.

Managing knowledge driven project with Confluence

Storing all our technical document and knowledge at the same place help me to simply organizing all the important document. The text search tools help me to find a very specific keyword and showing only related result with related keyword. Document versioning help to track latest document version and not overlapping the document.

Pros

Confluence providing a much needed space for knowledge driven project and to manage and track its progress. It is almost like a wikipedia for for all the knowledge and technical document implemented on our organization structure. The document stored can be tagged with comment and annotation to make it clear for any changes happen to the document and who has editing it.

Cons

One of the downside with Confluence is the document that are open can't be access by other user at the same time. It decrease effectiveness as no document collaboration can happen at the same time. They should make all the tools as simple as possible, too many tools offered with almost the same function will only introduce confusion for the user.

Confluence an Atlassian Product

Overall experience is very acceptable. Administering the site from a both security and content perspective has a very small learning curve. The ability to create categories within sight spaces is a plus. You can have a site space for documentation, teams, and knowledge base collaboration.

Pros

The software provides what's called “Space”. The Space serves as a work area where users can provide feedback depending on what their space is used for. Developers can add documents regarding there application development, helpdesk environments can add documents that provide how-to scenarios, and with the number of plugins that are available for confluence there's endless tools available for helping users, developers, and contributors to the manage there space a lot more easily. With this collaboration tool, our enterprise is able to communicate effectively and efficiently across multi departments.

Cons

When creating a space, pages would have a better appeal if formatting was a little more robust. Currently there are several templates that can be assigned however formatting content on the templates , adding pictures , resizing and alignment of the pictures can be a bit cumbersome.

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.

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.