Product Brief: Atlassian Confluence

What is it?

Confluence is the team collaboration tool from the Atlasssian suite of products that also includes JIRA and HipChat.

Who makes it?

Atlassian
1098 Harrison Street
San Francisco, CA, 94103
+1 415 701 1110

Headquarters in Sydney, Australia

What does it do?

Confluence is a collaboration tool where teams can organize, share and do work together. It is available in a cloud-based offering or a as a behind-the-firewall solution..

  • General collaboration features like workspaces, blogs and discussions, with unique comment anywhere feature.
  • File storage, search and versioning
  • Personal and team tasks
  • Rich text editor
  • Page hierarchies with versioning
  • Integration with JIRA development environment for collaboration on trouble tickets
  • Permissions at group, user and content level
  • Ad-ons for calendars and question and answer engine.
  • Marketplace of add-on integrations and features.

Competitors

Typical competitors include:

  • Basecamp
  • Zoho collaboration suite
  • Microsoft Sharepoint
  • MediaWiki

Where can I get?

http://www.atlassian.com

When it is available?

Confluence is available now.

How much does it cost?

Confluence, for 10 users, runs $10/mo for basic service and $20/mo for calendars or Q&A, and $30/mo for both. Full deployment at 2K users runs $2,000/mo.

Where in the world is it available?

Atlassian’s products are available in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish.

Analysis

Atlassian’s Confluence provides content-centric collaboration with the ability to provide direct feedback on pages and files. Confluence was developed to complement Atlassian’s original flagship product, JIRA, an issue tracker. They also offer HipChat for realtime communications, along with a variety of development and integration tools.

This contextual feedback, while available in tools like Microsoft Word, or in mark-ups with Adobe PDF files, is unique to Atlasssian when it comes to pages and text within those pages. Highlight just about anything and a tool pops up permitting comments on that selection.

Given the development origins of Confluence, it is no surprise that they offer a number of links to JIRA to support code development collaboration and trouble ticket management.

The JIRA integration results in a rich task management environment that does not require JIRA. Tasks aren’t project management, but they offer a good model with the ability to put tasks into any page and assign work via @mentions and integrated pop-ups for due dates within the text string.

Confluence includes it own file storage so its adopters won’t necessarily need Box, DropBox or Google Drive (though those platforms are supported via the Marketplace).

Picking up on the extensibility of applications, Atlasssian has created a market place for add-ons to Confluence and its other tools.

Confluence is a deep collaboration service with strong development orientation, but just as applicable to content development and projects. Calendaring, along with Q&A and HipChat, should eventually migrate to the main product to provide a more integrated experience. Improved mobile support would also be welcomed.