Atlassian Confluence

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

I like the simplicity of the product.
You can view the change history and who made the change.
It looks visually good.

Nachteile

I find it hard to find some pages. Because it has a page hierarchy on a list, it can take some time to find what you are looking for.
There is a search option that mitigates the problem.
We also have some table features missing like freeze top row.

Vorteile

Confluence offers my company a unique solution for creating and organizing documentation and assets that need to be share amongst an entire team. In addition, it offers us a means to share some of those same documents and assets with our customers without any additional effort. Its advance permissions schemes allow you to dictate which users have access to which files, and its ease of use allows for quick publication and instant distribution. As we also use JIRA for project management, Confluence is a great complement for linking supplemental, more detailed files to ongoing projects.

Nachteile

Confluence word processing features are a bit rudimentary. While the application itself is easy to use, its feature limitations only allow for a certain level of detail and imagination when creating new documents. While it links seamless into the JIRA project management platform, it does come with an additional cost per user, which quick racks up your monthly Atlassian bill. For more advanced needs, an alternative platform may be a better fit.

Vorteile

Its easy to use and you can throw anything at it. You can control who sees what completely. Everything you add is searchable.

Nachteile

It becomes quite huge soon and you end up having a giant repository of data to shift through. You have search functionality but eventually it ends up searching similar to google. I don't know what they can do to make it more simpler but thats the biggest issue I face.