What do you like best about the product?

It's one of the oldest platforms - it's probably got every single usage, versioning, and administration feature you can think of.

What do you dislike about the product?

It's one of the oldest platforms, and it shows in its slowness, awkwardness in its editor, the convolution of its setup/nomenclature

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Product documentation - we got started documenting our product features, functionality and UI decisions, quickly realized how painful Confliuence was to use and therefore wasteful for a small team, and then switched to a combination of Notion and gitbook.

What do you like best about the product?

In principle, the confluence suite is designed to streamline project and program management. It is offered as a one-stop shop for all of the things you would want as a PM and as a member of the team: tasking, document management, archiving, software repo and versioning, etc.

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly, just about everything. If you sit down and login without any prior knowledge of the suite, it is so counterintuitive to perform anything that you basically have to take a class. I did 3 different courses on LinkedIn Learning, and still struggled to perform most any task. And most people in my groups were similarly confused, befuddled, and frustrated, so that many of the "helpful" PM ideas that Confluence offers, like shared notes, shared documents, or even Jira for tasking, were so awkward that we just stopped using it altogether.

Let me give an analogy. I bought a hypersensitive camera to use on a telescope so I could project what it sees onto a computer. It is hand made, very expensive, and if you tune it correctly, what it shows on the screen takes everyone's breath away. BUT!!! Not one action that you would actually use is labelled in a way that makes sense. To make the image brighter, as just one example, you have to click a button labeled "IVD", for "increase voltage drop". The start-up procedure is super confusing, and half the time when you push a button, you have to fiddle with something else to compensate for something else that changed. Now, If you don't have a sheet next to you to translate, it is hopeless until you memorize everything. And a bunch of things that always happen together are left to the user to fiddle with separately. Without any offense to the designer, it all makes sense to him because he built it and wrote the interface. But there was no end user next to him to say "hey, I need to be able to use this, and what you are doing doesn't make any sense."

The best way I can describe this suite is from this same analogy. It was created by specialized folks -- all of whom understand what it is and how it works and how you navigate everywhere -- but I don't think they had nearly enough real end users who *are not* software engineers (or the right analogs) managing its creation so that it is easy to use and intuitive from day one.

I think many readers of this might counter "well, it makes perfect sense to me," but I bet that only happened after a huge learning curve." If you are trying to manage complex projects with multiple team members and many moving parts, how effective is it to have a product that is supposed to make everything easier, when the learning curve is so steep that a roomfull of Ph.D. scientists can't figure it out in a few hours?

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have tried using it to manage projects with multiple moving parts, including tasking, document creation, archiving meeting notes, and sharing with members of aligned teams on the larger program. One of our younger team members spent a week learning how to run the Jira board and had to do every keystroke for the rest of us, so we were able to manage tasking but when he left the group, we just stopped using it altogether. I tried archiving notes but no one could find them. We tried sharing a document for editing but just went back to emailing it around or using OneNote. In other words, the benefits were pretty few in the end, since we decided the time we spent wresting with this system wasn't worth the gains.

What do you like best about the product?

Confluence provides all the information related to your project, program, company, etc... in a single place and acts as a knowledge base, website or guide for your product or service.

What do you dislike about the product?

The tool is a bit difficult the first time you use it and requires some digging before getting used to it. It needs to have a more intuitive UI for easier access.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's currently helping our team have knowledge base articles, SOPs, and a process update portal. It's provided a way to centralize all the information in a single place with easy access for everyone involved in the project.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would recommend going into articles and reviewing the home page to get accustomed to it. Check the customization tools and the liberty you have to create new articles for internal company procedures.

What do you like best about the product?

Confluence is an effective place to store documentation and user flows, but the UX could be improved. I like how it enables our team to have a central place to store backlogs and documents.

What do you dislike about the product?

I dislike the UX on Confluence. It was not intuitive to me at first how to upload documents or format pages. I still have difficulty formatting pages after years of use.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our team uses Confluence as a central repository for our product team's documentation, process flows and backlogs. We have seen benefit in organizing all content in one place on Confluence.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I recommend that you establish a system for creating confluence pages and ensure they are kept neat.

What do you like best about the product?

The templates that are easy to use, easy to be viewed by colleagues, easy to piblish information, easy to keep information private, blog page for internal use, collaborating on the same document, its all amazing! You can connect witb jira and do tasks there. The way you can use it has no boundaries.

What do you dislike about the product?

I really have nothing to object. I mean its one of those platforns you cabbot find something bad to say about it. They improve constantly, they are agile and make our teams agile, share ideas, share products, information, processes.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Interdepartment communication, sharing of knowledge, of proposal, of proceses, of news, details, be them images, videos, updates, tables, links. The best part is that everything is organized.

What do you like best about the product?

If your enterprise uses bitbucket, Jira, then confluence will be your obvious choice to maintain your application documentation. Because all these three apps are by attlasian the inetgration between them will be seamless.It's really easy to use and also has versioning feature. You can link your bitbucket, Jira everything in your documentation.

What do you dislike about the product?

The page-load is a bit slower at times. If you are using all of the Atlassian products, then only it would be good for you. Need more orientation items like numbering.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using confluence for maintaining all our client documentation, including application overview, design documents, Jira information, etc. It's like our Wikipedia of all our application information.

What do you like best about the product?

1) Wide array of text editing tools
2) Integration with other Atlassian tools, especially Jira helps in pulling out data automatically
3) Has features to track views on a page.

What do you dislike about the product?

1) The editing tools aren't exhaustive. Would have loved spell check, font selector, font size selector etc
2) Hasn't yet automatically integrated with Trello - another Atlassian product and a far simpler task management tool than Jira

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

1) Using it to document projects
2) Using it to create internal knowledgebase for the organisation
3) Using it for giving project updates to stakeholders
4) Using it to show sprint reports by integrating with Jira

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you are using the Atlassian suite then you need not go for any other Wiki software. However, as a standalone product Confluence needs some more work in terms of integrations and editing abilities.

What do you like best about the product?

I like Confluence because it is easy to use and has various valuable templates. Works best when you use JIRA as well as you can link them back to user stories.

What do you dislike about the product?

Attaching image is not as flexible as I would like it to be. It has a rigid grid system which makes it ugly when attaching multiple images.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed a place to document our work so that anyone and everyone can gain full context regarding a specific initiative, feature, or implementation.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would highly recommend Confluence only if you're using JIRA. Otherwise, you're probably save a lot of money using something free like Google Docs.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to use for wiki and share it across the organization. Easy integration with other atlassian tool sets like Jira. Mentions and notifications works great. Compared to other wiki tools, this stands aside for sure.

What do you dislike about the product?

Permissions can be challenging. It is easy to miss that the document you share is not protected. Notification mechanisms for an open page would be ideal,

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Engineering documentation are easy to make and share. Several templates are available which can ease up the process. Using this product can be effective for improvng productivity.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

This is simple easy to use product. If you need complicated needs, this might not be the right one.

What do you like best about the product?

I love how Confluence can be accessed by any member of the team, it is a collaborative document that allows anyone to take part in the creation of any type of documentation. I have used this ranging from Product Requirement Documents, Roadmaps, Sounding Boards, Presentation Tools, to even more. It can be whatever you need it to be

What do you dislike about the product?

The only thing that is frustrating is the way you organize and file documents together. I wish there was a folder feature (there essentially is) but it is not super easy to have that learning curve without really diving into it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Primarily the problem I am trying to solve is communicating Requirements or Experiments that the product team has run to other Stakeholders. It is super easy to do so with Confluence since you are able to tag and mention others within the document itself