Confluence - A jack of all trades collaboration tool
October 05, 2016

Confluence - A jack of all trades collaboration tool

David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence

Confluence was used by the entire organization to track product development for a team using agile scrum methodology. It was used solely for this purpose, although I've previously used Confluence for Kanban, support ticket tracking, and wiki/documentation.

Pros

  • Confluence tries to provide a lot of team collaboration features under one cohesive product, and it succeeds in giving the user an integrated experience throughout its product(s).
  • Confluence is highly configurable to suit different needs and processes a team may have for managing their work.
  • Confluence has a developer API which offers even further customization and automation possibilities.

Cons

  • Confluence as a whole is very resource intensive and runs extremely slowly. This was the main reason our team abandoned it as our scrum tracking solution.
  • The number of configuration options can cause the application to be confusing if you're wanting to tweak any of the defaults.
  • The relationship between Kanban, backlog and sprint views could be particularly counter-intuitive.
  • At a previous company, Confluence made creation and resolution of support tickets across a large and distributed organization very manageable. This was a major positive impact in that it allowed efficient management of many different customer deployments in a responsive manner.
  • At my current company, Confluence would have had a negative impact do to the slowness of the product, adding a significant overhead for our small team to get things done.
Confluence was trying to be too much for our needs; we needed a scrum process management tool and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System turned out to have the exact set of features we needed.
In a larger organization, performance/responsiveness may not be as big an issue, and may be a cost worth paying for a cohesive product that could be used company-wide. In order to attract smaller businesses, it would have to really optimize performance to feel "lean" enough to be worth using. For support ticket tracking, especially when integrated with HipChat, I found Confluence to be a powerful tool, but for agile/scrum there are better tools out there that are more specialized to accommodate the requirements of the process.

Confluence Feature Ratings

Project Management
4.8
Task Management
4
Gantt Charts
Not Rated
Scheduling
4
Workflow Automation
3
Mobile Access
8
Search
7
Visual planning tools
3
Communication
8.8
Chat
10
Notifications
10
Discussions
8
Surveys
Not Rated
Internal knowledgebase
7
Integrates with GoToMeeting
Not Rated
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts
Not Rated
Integrates with Outlook
Not Rated
File Sharing & Management
Not Rated
Versioning
Not Rated
Video files
Not Rated
Audio files
Not Rated
Document collaboration
Not Rated
Access control
Not Rated
Advanced security features
Not Rated
Integrates with Google Drive
Not Rated
Device sync
Not Rated

Comments

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