What Is Confluence?
- Centralized workspace
- Project collaboration
- Knowledge management
- Over 100 pre-made templates
Confluence is a team collaboration software that offers a virtual workspace for teams to build, organize and collaborate on work in one place. This platform is a product of Atlassian, the same company that produces popular tools such as Jira, Bitbucket and Trello.
Confluence provides a user-friendly text editor, document approval workflows, great audit trails and pre-built templates, making it a perfect platform to document everything. Due to its standout features, the software made it into our list of Best Project Management Software Of 2024.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
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HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
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Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
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ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
What Sets Confluence Apart
Confluence sets itself apart from its competitors as a perfect collaboration tool for teams with its versatility, large number of templates and macros, wealth of collaboration features and robust access control and permissions options.
Pros
Confluence is quite versatile in that it’s used for creating documents, organizing knowledge, creating internal wikis and collaborating on projects. It has dedicated spaces for different teams to work on their projects and allows for seamless connection across teams.
Cons
Confluence’s pricing model can be costly, especially for those who require more features and access to premium functionalities or integrations. It can also be difficult to customize or adjust to the specific needs of a team or project. According to some users, certain document formatting options are limited and hard to use.
Confluence Core Features
Knowledge Management
Confluence Knowledge Management is a robust system designed to streamline the documentation process and enhance the organization of page hierarchies. Apart from its ability to build a knowledge base for documentation and product requirements, the platform also offers an intuitive page hierarchy, advanced search capabilities and labels to help users organize and find pages easily. Additionally, the multiple pages icon enables users to create multiple pages within a single space, further enhancing organization and flexibility.
Project Collaboration
One of Confluence’s standout features is the ability to create, collaborate and comment on pages and project plans. This allows team members to work together in real time, making updates and changes as needed, and keeping everyone up to date on the latest developments.
Another key feature of Confluence is its real-time editing capabilities. With the ability to co-edit together in real time, teams can work together seamlessly, making updates and changes as needed. Version history tracking allows you to see exactly what changes were made and by whom, making it easy to keep everyone on the same page.
Role Assignment Features
Confluence provides role assignment features to manage user permissions, including administrators, space administrators and anonymous users. Users can be added or removed from groups to manage their access to spaces and content. Confluence allows administrators to manage global permissions and set system-wide defaults for spaces, pages and blogs.
Gantt Charts
Confluence has no native support for Gantt charts, so it’s available as an add-on. Easy Gantt Charts for Confluence is an app available on the Atlassian Marketplace that makes creating Gantt charts, timeline charts and roadmaps simple and easy.
The app allows users to add data and preview charts instantly, and provides features such as drag-and-drop support for progress, duration, start and end date, configurable scales such as day, week, month, quarter and year, and nested tasks and tree view. Users can also set dependencies between projects and tasks, and easily edit data in the table. The app is free for up to 10 users and adds an average of 50 cents per user for more than 10 users.
Software Integrations
The Atlassian Marketplace has thousands of apps and integrations that can be used to enhance the functionality of Confluence. Some of the most popular apps and integrations for Confluence include:
- Charts and diagrams apps such as draw.io, Gliffy, Lucidchart and Table Filter
- Document management and automation apps including Google Drive, Scroll Word Exporter, ScriptRunner and Office 365
- Themes and styling apps such as Refined Toolkit, Advanced Tables, Render Markdown and Presenter
- Team collaboration apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Trello
Confluence Pricing and Plans
Free Plan
The Confluence Free plan comes packed with features that can help your team move forward. From unlimited spaces and pages to best practice templates and page versioning, this plan provides everything you need to create and organize content efficiently.
Standard Plan
The Confluence Standard plan is an excellent choice for growing teams that require advanced features for knowledge-sharing, collaboration and content organization. It provides users with powerful features, including page and space permissions, data residency, anonymous access and page insights. With local business hours support, users can be sure that they will have access to expert assistance whenever they need it.
Premium Plan
If you’re part of a large team or organization that relies on Confluence, the Premium plan might be the best choice for you. This plan includes all the features from the Free and Standard plans, as well as additional tools to help you manage and protect your data at scale. With the Premium plan, you can take advantage of analytics to understand user engagement, team calendars to stay organized and a sandbox to test products and apps before making changes to your live production environment. And if you ever run into issues, you’ll have access to 24/7 Premium support to help you keep your systems running smoothly.
Enterprise Plan
The Confluence Enterprise plan is an excellent choice for larger businesses or organizations that need a robust and scalable knowledge management and collaboration solution. With unlimited sites, centralized security features such as Single Sign-On (SSO), SCIM, Active Directory Sync, 24/7 Enterprise support and a high uptime SLA, this plan provides the peace of mind and features that enterprises require to stay productive and secure.
Setup and Customization
Setting up Confluence is easy and straightforward. After creating an account with Atlassian, you can either choose to host Confluence on the cloud or install it on your server. If you choose the cloud option, you can start using it immediately, and Atlassian takes care of all the technical aspects. If you choose to install it on your server, you will need to ensure that your server meets the minimum system requirements.
Once you have set up Confluence, you can start customizing it according to your needs. Confluence provides integrations with third-party solutions, which complements the tooling available with the basic package.
Ease of Use
One of the strengths of Confluence is its ease of use. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface that makes it simple to create and share content. Confluence provides a range of templates and macros that can help automate and simplify tasks. Users can collaborate in real-time on documents, which increases team productivity and efficiency.
Security
Confluence security is a top priority for Atlassian, and it has implemented several measures to ensure that users’ data is protected. One of the key features of Confluence Cloud Premium is a 99.9% uptime service-level agreement (SLA) with financially backed service credits. This guarantees that global teams using Confluence can remain productive without interruption.
Furthermore, Atlassian Access allows organization admins to track all user and group management changes across Jira and Confluence Cloud sites through organization audit logs. All data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2-plus with perfect forward secrecy, and servers holding user data use full disk, industry-standard AES 256 encryption.
Customer Service and Support
Confluence offers several channels for customer support, including an extensive knowledge base with documentation and tutorials, a community forum where users can share tips and best practices, and a support portal where users can submit support tickets to Atlassian’s support team.
When it comes to plans, the level of support varies:
- Standard plan: Operates on a nine-to-five schedule (eight hours per day, Monday–Friday)
- Premium plan: Offers access to 24/7 support for high-impact issues and records faster response times
- Enterprise plan: Offers access to 24/7 support for all technical issues, phone support, involves a senior support team and records the fastest response times.
Additional Features
Guest/Client Access
Confluence provides an opportunity for external users to collaborate on content with a specific set of permissions. Guests are identified with a label and have limited access to internal user information, which makes it easy for organizations to keep track of who has access to their content.
Macros
Macros help to extend the functionality of Confluence pages and spaces. They can be used to display content such as multimedia, dynamic data and other web applications.
Spaces
Users can create unlimited spaces, each managed as a separate wiki with its own administrator, permissions and theme.
Pages
Confluence allows users to start with a page template when creating a new page in a space.
Users can import Word documents, converting them into collaborative wiki pages that are searchable, viewable, editable and secure. Pages in a space can be organized into a hierarchy of parent and child pages, allowing for simple but effective categorization of content.
Confluence Alternatives and How They Compare
Confluence vs. Airtable
Confluence and Airtable are both project collaboration and management platforms, but differ in functionalities.
While Confluence is a wiki-style collaboration space that focuses on team ownership and collaboration, Airtable is primarily used for database management and collaboration in small to medium-sized enterprises and project departments in large enterprises. Its spreadsheet-like interface is flexible, allowing users to build their own databases and adjust them to their specific needs.
Confluence vs. Basecamp
Basecamp is a widely trusted document management tool for collaboration and project management, commonly used by nonprofits and businesses. However, it has limited features and is mainly focused on document management. Confluence, on the other hand, is a wiki with broad features and add-ons that allow for a wide range of configurations.
While Confluence may provide more flexibility and more options for user management, it has a significant price tag, which may be a prohibitive factor for some companies, unlike Basecamp, which is hosted online and offers a free version for teachers and students and discounts for nonprofits. Learn more about Basecamp with our Basecamp review.
Confluence vs. SharePoint
Confluence is ranked higher than SharePoint in terms of integration potential and overall functionality, while SharePoint offers more flexibility and beauty to the pages you can create. Both are good choices for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large public enterprises. You can learn more in our Confluence vs. SharePoint comparison piece.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Who Is Confluence Best For?
Confluence is best suited for small businesses that require an open and collaborative workspace to manage their documents and knowledge bases. It is ideal for businesses looking for a centralized location to store and access information, share and discuss ideas and opinions effectively, and organize and maintain knowledge and information.
It’s also a great choice for companies with virtual teams that need to collaborate on projects while fostering inclusion and positive company cultures.
Our Expert Take
Upon signing up on the Atlassian cloud site, we were able to invite teammates and get onboarded quickly with Confluence Quickstart. At first, the user interface appeared complex and challenging to navigate, but with prolonged use, it became easier to understand and use effectively. While Confluence is not a content management system (CMS), it has the same feel as it allows you to create and edit pages with 130 ready-to-use templates, and import external documents.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Confluence?
Developed by Atlassian, Confluence is an excellent tool for knowledge management, document creation and sharing, as well as collaboration within an organization.
Which is better, Jira or Confluence?
The answer to this boils down to your specific needs. Jira is a project management tool used for issue tracking and Agile software development, while Confluence is a collaboration and document management tool.
What are the disadvantages of Confluence?
Some potential disadvantages include its high price tag, steep learning curve for new users and limited customization options compared to other platforms.
Is Confluence a good product?
Confluence is a widely used and respected product adopted by over 75,000 customers for collaboration and document management, with a variety of useful features and add-ons. However, whether it is a good product for your specific needs depends on your individual requirements and preferences.
