What is Confluence?

What is Confluence used for?

Confluence is a collaboration / wiki type tool used for teams to collaborate and share information and documentation. It can be seen as a team workplace where project plans, documentation and diagrams can be shared and worked on.

Confluence is organised into spaces and pages.

Spaces can be assigned to teams or multiple teams for larger projects. Each user also has their own personal space.

You create page within your space, which can be private until it’s ready. Then you can publish and share with others in your team. You can also monitor other pages for changes to see when updates are made.

Confluence comes with over 90 templates so you can publish great content really easily, it also comes with a mobile app for updates and working on the move.

Users have full access to many editing tools and can embed images, setup tables and charts. Users can work on the same document at the same time as pages operate with full version control.

If you know where your pages are located you can browse to the direct link, or you can use search functionality to find search terms and tags to locate your documents.

You can embed Jira task lists within Confluence with easy to enable scripts, or you can create a project space and specify the Jira project at this time.

Confluence is made by Atlassian an Australian software company which also created Trello and Jira – more on that later.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Is Confluence similar to Sharepoint?

Yes it is similar in that Sharepoint is used to host documents but Confluence has much more functionality and is seen as a singe source of truth, whilst Sharepoint is more for just storing documents.

Can I use Confluence for free?

Yes you can use Confluence for free for up to 10 users click the link below to signup

https://www.atlassian.com/try/cloud/signup?bundle=confluence&edition=free

Confluence vs Jira

Confluence and Jira are two completely separate products from Atlassian which can be used together or on their own. They also compliment each other very well so are sometimes viewed as the same product.

• Jira is focussed around giving teams tasks and managing those tasks, it is very good at managing priorities and task completion.
• Confluence is used to manage online content and documentation and allows users and teams full version control and access control to all this content.

Confluence and Jira do not require each other to work, but they really work well together.

e.g. if a software developer has been assigned a task in Jira they can reference the product documentation or design in Confluence.

Confluence and Jira share the same authentication system so users can seamlessly move between both applications.