However, I've had a different experience to this one:
> You can organize your company workspaces however you'd like.
...unless you want to, say, include two subsubsubpages with the same title in the same space. You want a space per project? You want to put documentation for multiple major versions into Confluence? Atlassian tells you "Nope".
Which is my main gripe with Atlassian about now. There's a pretty old ticket on the titles thing, with loads of comments asking to change this. It was simply ignored.
With Jira, there was the same thing: The release management part has some limitations, someone opened a ticket, hundreds of customers agreed, Atlassian closed it. And allthough their final comment starts with "we listen to and value your feedback", it states that no, this won't be solved. Ever.
Edit: Oh, and don't get me started on their search.
Feel free to contact me directly. moura @ the domain in my profile
I would absolutely never rely on the permissions in Confluence to store anything sensitive in it ever again.
When you take into consideration price AND maturity AND feature set it's honestly hard to beat. I tried lots of open source Wikis and all of them lack significant amounts of polish and/or features. Confluence at least resembles a mature solution that mostly covers all the bases. And if you're a small (very small) business or just doing a personal/family Wiki, $10 per year for all that can't be beat.
It's not bad. It's not great either. Which is pretty much the best way to describe all Atlassian products. It's unbearable on slow or spotty internet connections. It's riddled with bugs (just the other day my spacebar literally stopped working in their edit view). The formatting gets in your way more than markdown, but at least not as much as something like OneNote.
But, it's powerful. Like any Atlassian product, you can script it to do basically whatever you want. You can organize your company workspaces however you'd like. You can set up tables which can automatically pull summary lines of any other page labeled with a specific label, which is great for automatically building indexes or tables of content.
Overall, I haven't found anything better, and I write a lot of technical documentation for our company.
For comparison's sake:
- Github/Gitlab wikis are pretty bad. There's almost no advantage to using them over just storing markdown in the repository.
- Which, we did for a while, and it works fine, but in its simplicity it misses some of the key features that I do like about Confluence (like those automated index pages and page comments).
- We also used Dropbox Paper for a while; I really like it, but its primarily useful for, let's call them "transactional" documentation (write, get feedback, never look at again); It's not very good at being a Wiki, storing long-term long-form information. And given that Confluence can handle both pretty well, there's not a great argument for adopting a new service from an entirely different company we don't otherwise use.
- We have G-Suite and thus Drive/Docs. The inability to easily write technical documentation with inline/block code makes it a non-starter. No thanks. If Drive added a markdown editor like Dropbox Paper I'd probably push to switch; the search is pretty great, its a platform we already have, and you get a full, amazing document editor for those documents where it makes sense.
- I've never used Quip in a real work setting.