Confluence Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

Confluence is a corporate wiki with a wide range of robust requirements management features and customization options. It’s used by businesses ranging from SMEs to well-established organizations such as LinkedIn, The New York Times, and NASA.

Confluence is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to collect, organize, and share requirements with the team. The software emphasizes visual data, allowing real-time updates and easy project progress tracking. This affordable, simple, and powerful software is just as ideal for sophisticated environments as inexperienced teams.

Confluence Compared to the Best Requirements Management Tools

Confluence is our most recommended requirements management tool for most businesses. If you have special requirements, here are some Confluence alternatives that also made it to our list of the best requirements tools.

Monday.com is a simple requirements management system with an intuitive interface for quick onboarding. Skip the learning curve and get a free plan now.

ClickUp is a highly flexible and adaptable tool best for versatile environments. Get it for free without a credit card, and it’s yours to keep forever.

Jira is a secure and convenient requirements management system created by the team behind Confluence for software development teams. Get it for free today.

Confluence: The Good and the Bad

Confluence is a robust requirements management tool that offers a wide range of features and customization options. However, Confluence has some limitations, such as limited time tracking capabilities, resource management, project management, and collaboration features, compared to other alternatives, such as Monday.com, ClickUp, and Jira. These alternatives may be more suitable for businesses with specific needs in these areas.

What Confluence Is Good At 

Confluence is an intuitive yet powerful tool best suited for most teams. Here are some strengths that make the app stand out. 

Top-market ease-of-use: Confluence’s ease of use is one of the reasons it’s so popular. The platform’s simple navigation allows users to easily collect, organize, and share requirements with the team. Team members can also quickly familiarize themselves with the software and use it effectively. 

Tight security and access controls: Confluence is a product of Atlassian, a software company known for robust security and access features. The platform allows for granular control over user access and permissions, which helps to ensure that sensitive information is only accessible to authorized users. 

Confluence also provides multiple layers of security, such as authentication and encryption, to protect data from unauthorized access. This is particularly useful for businesses that handle sensitive information, such as financial or personal data, and must comply with strict security regulations.

Emphasis on visual data: Confluence’s emphasis on visual data is another strength. Visual data enables easy tracking of project progress with real-time updates. Team members can easily comprehend the status of a project and spot any potential problems thanks to the intuitive UI. This promotes better teamwork and communication, resulting in more successful project outcomes.

Excellent integrations: Another strength of Confluence is its ability to integrate with a range of common apps. This allows teams to use Confluence in conjunction with other software they may already be using, such as Jira, Trello, Dropbox, etc. Seamless integration improves efficiency and productivity by allowing teams to use the tools that work best for them. 

The ability to integrate with other tools also allows teams to take advantage of Confluence’s features without having to switch to a completely new platform. For example, if a team is already using Jira for software development, they can easily integrate Confluence with Jira and use Confluence’s requirements management features while still using Jira for development tasks. 

Powerful customization capacity: One of the platform’s key benefits is the extensive customization options that Confluence provides. Users have the option of creating custom workflows with pre-built templates. Thanks to this degree of customization, teams can adapt the software to their unique needs, which boosts productivity and efficiency. The ability to design unique workflows also enables teams to adjust quickly to changes, which is essential for project management.

Built-in document management: Confluence’s document management feature is another strength of the platform. It allows teams to easily store, organize and share documents in one central location. This makes it easy for team members to access the information they need when they need it. 

The revision control feature also allows teams to keep track of document versions and ensure that the most recent one is being used. This helps to improve efficiency and productivity and also helps to keep the team on track. 

Unique Roadmap feature: Confluence’s Roadmap feature is a key strength as it makes it simple for teams to monitor team size, project scope, and sprint progress. Teams benefit by staying organized and on task, which ultimately produces better project results. Teams can also customize the feature to meet their unique requirements and level of complexity thanks to the flexibility of making roadmaps as simple or complex as necessary.

Detailed reporting and analytics: Confluence also has a strong reporting and analytics feature. The platform allows teams to create and view reports on project progress, team capacity, etc. This helps teams stay informed and make more informed data-driven decisions.

The ability to create custom reports also allows teams to tailor the feature to their specific needs and level of complexity. For example, teams can track specific metrics that are important to them, which helps to identify potential issues early on.

Highly cost-effective: Confluence offers better pricing than many other requirements management tools, making it affordable for companies of all sizes, shapes, and types. This is a key strength as it enables SMBs to utilize the features provided by Confluence without having to spend extra money on pricey solutions. The competitive price also makes it a desirable choice for companies that want to manage multiple projects simultaneously.

What Confluence Is Lacking

As mentioned above, Confluence is one of the most robust options in requirements management. As an across-the-board solution in that field, few platforms can match it. But when you move away from requirements management and into other management areas, there are a few places where the tool needs improvement. 

Limited time-tracking capability: Confluence’s limited time-tracking capability is one of its weaknesses compared to other options like Monday.com or ClickUp. These substitutes provide more sophisticated time-tracking features that make it possible to track how long is spent on tasks and projects more accurately. 

Few resource management features: Confluence’s limited resource management capabilities are another weak point compared to Jira. Jira provides more sophisticated resource management capabilities, including the capacity to assign tasks to particular team members, monitor their progress, and regulate their workloads. 

Basic project management capacity: Confluence has fewer project management features than ClickUp because it is primarily a requirements management tool. ClickUp has more sophisticated PM tools, such as custom statuses and roles, workload charts, task dependencies, etc.

Narrow range of collaboration features: Confluence is less potent in collaboration than Monday.com. Monday.com has more advanced collaboration tools, such as making boards, assigning tasks to particular team members, setting deadlines, and monitoring progress. 

Less customization: One of the areas for improvement of Confluence, especially compared to Jira, is its limited customization. Jira offers more advanced customization options for workflows and issue tracking, making it a better option for businesses that need to tailor the software to their specific needs. 

Confluence Options and Pricing

Confluence has a free plan that supports up to 10 users. You can create an unlimited number of spaces and pages with this plan. You can also add apps and integrations such as Jira, Dropbox, Slack, Google Docs, and Microsoft Teams.

The free version has solid security features such as password policies and encryption. With this plan, you get 2 GB of file storage and can access community support.

The Standard and Premium plans can have up to 35,000 users—along with additional perks. These paid plans have a one-week trial period that doesn’t require a credit card. There’s also an Enterprise Plan for businesses with multiple products. Let’s learn more about these plans and see what’s included.

Confluence Standard Plan

The Confluence Standard plan is designed for SMEs and local businesses. It includes everything from the free plan with some powerful unlocks.

The Standard plan can support 20,000 users, and you get 250 GB of cloud file storage, client support during local business hours, and user permissions such as page and space permissions and anonymous access. You can also archive and unarchive pages to use the 250 GB storage limit to its fullest.

The pricing structure depends on the number of users. If you have ten users, the estimated fee per user per month is $5.75. For 300 users, the first 100 users are billed at $5.75, 150 users are $4.40, and the remaining 50 users are $3.30. So the average estimated price per user per month goes down to $4.67.

Confluence Premium Plan

The Confluence Premium Plan is ideal for businesses that cannot afford to compromise on functionality. It has everything from the Standard plan plus additional premium features.

The Premium Plan gives you 24/7 premium support and unlimited storage for scalability. This plan also guarantees 99.9% uptime SLA, meaning that the service will be available and operational 99.9% of the time. 

Other features include:

• Analytics
• IP allowlisting
• Team calendars
• Inspect permissions
• Bulk page archiving
• Admin key
• Admin insights
• Sandbox mode
• Release tracks
• Copy space permissions

The Premium Plan will also be upgraded to include upcoming Confluence features, such as external collaboration and automation.

The pricing structure for the Premium Plan also depends on the number of users. For instance, the estimated average per user per month price is $11 for 100 users and $7.56 for 500 users.

Confluence Enterprise Plan

The Confluence Enterprise Plan is well-suited to corporations that need top-tier solutions from Atlassian. This includes everything from the Premium Plan with increased scalability, advanced security, and additional insights.

With the Enterprise Plan, you can have an unlimited sites for each product instance instead of just one. This plan also includes centralized per-user licensing, Atlassian access, 24/7 Enterprise-level support, and even superior uptime SLA of 99.95%. The Enterprise Plan is the only one to get three upcoming Data & Insights features.

Atlassian doesn’t list the pricing structure for the Enterprise Plan on its website. This plan is only accessible through its sales team.

Confluence in Summary

Confluence is a powerful requirements management system designed to meet most businesses’ needs. It’s reliable, secure, intuitive, and integrates seamlessly with over 3000 other applications. 

Most control and analytics features of Confluence unlock with Standard and Premium plans. Still, the free plan includes all the essentials a small team would need, including security features.

Confluence was our top choice in our review of the best requirements management tools. However, businesses with team members less familiar with digital platforms may find Monday.com easier to adopt. On the other hand, companies that value flexibility more than organization and collaboration may find ClickUp more versatile.

Also created by Atlassian, Jira is the go-to requirements management tool for teams that mostly work on software development. It also integrates with Confluence and vice versa.