I disagree with the parent that they're poorly integrated. They're probably better-integrated than most other options out there. IMO the real problem with Atlassian products is that individually they are not good. Confluence is a bad wiki, Jira is a bad issue/project tracker, Bitbucket is a bad source code management tool.

Individually they all have a lot of flaws to the point that if they only existed on their own, no one would use them. But features like native support for referencing Jira issues in Confluence and having them auto-update makes companies want to use it.

Part of it, I think, is the development tool version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's considered the safe choice. Enterprise-y companies get wooed by all the "Atlassian consultants" floating around out there. The ecosystem is just designed to attract enterprise users.

> I disagree with the parent that they're poorly integrated. They're probably better-integrated than most other options out there. IMO the real problem with Atlassian products is that individually they are not good. Confluence is a bad wiki, Jira is a bad issue/project tracker, Bitbucket is a bad source code management tool.

Fair enough, I agree - they are not that poorly integrated as they are just really poor tools.

I have been a very happy user every time I used Atlassian products on their own, so bad are many of the in-house enterprise alternatives, or products like DOORS and Notes.

Each to their own, I guess. We use Jira and Confluence at my org. I personally don't make use of the integrations between them all that much, but I find them painful to use on their own.

Atlassian is better than the enterprise solutions which preceded it, but that is a very, very low bar.

Their tools are remarkably slow, with each page both being remarkably JavaScript-heavy and constantly reloading (the two should be mutually exclusive, right?).

They really aren't bad, and have some advantages, but they are not a joy to use.