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 broadly agree with your assessment of confluence (maybe with the difference that I'd draw the "bad" line really close to it).
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.
If you want something similar to Dropbox Paper, but better optimized towards long-term documentation, you should give Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com) a try. In terms of organization capabilities it is similar to Confluence. But I'm the CTO so I'm obviously biased.
Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately we have no plans for a self-hosted version. We understand that this is a no go for certain companies and types of information.
Any reason that you can share? This looks great, so much better than confluence, but it’s hard to store all of this on someone else’s servers. I’d love to have a self hosted version, of you ever decide to.
Thanks for the information! We did not notice any anomality and are receiving signups, but are looking into what might have caused the issue. In case it's a persistent issue for you, it would be awesome if you could contact us via email so we can further investigate the issue.
The worst bug (or bad design if you wish) I've seen in confluence is the following - permissions on pages are inherited in a tree-like manner, parent to child. A reindex wasn't done and at some point child pages with sensitive information became viewable to every user because the permissions were not re-applied.
I would absolutely never rely on the permissions in Confluence to store anything sensitive in it ever again.
Yeah, we have a corporate policy of never storing anything critically sensitive in an Atlassian product. Though, to be fair, we have the same policy for Slack and most of our tools; that stuff never leaves Amazon.
I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option. I looked at Quip but it felt more informal than I was comfortable in particularly the lack of ability to setup teams and permissions that way.
I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option.
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.
My experience of Quip is very similiar to how you described Dropbox Paper (which I haven't used): write, get feedback with in-line comments, collaborate, and forget the whole thing. But it's nice, slim, and fast.
Comments
Confluence.
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.
I broadly agree with your assessment of confluence (maybe with the difference that I'd draw the "bad" line really close to it).
However, I've had a different experience to this one:
...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.
If you want something similar to Dropbox Paper, but better optimized towards long-term documentation, you should give Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com) a try. In terms of organization capabilities it is similar to Confluence. But I'm the CTO so I'm obviously biased.
Beautiful looking product. Any plans for a self-hosted version? Cloud based storage of a lot of information I deal with is a no go.
Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately we have no plans for a self-hosted version. We understand that this is a no go for certain companies and types of information.
Basically all enterprises. We really need a viable alternative to Atlassian :/
Any reason that you can share? This looks great, so much better than confluence, but it’s hard to store all of this on someone else’s servers. I’d love to have a self hosted version, of you ever decide to.
This looks perfect for what I'm looking for. But I need to serve it to MY customers along our software. Is there any way do that?
Feel free to contact me directly. moura @ the domain in my profile
Just a head-ups, I think your signup form is broken. I was trying to create an account to try it out and nothing happens if I click 'continue'.
Thanks for the information! We did not notice any anomality and are receiving signups, but are looking into what might have caused the issue. In case it's a persistent issue for you, it would be awesome if you could contact us via email so we can further investigate the issue.
The worst bug (or bad design if you wish) I've seen in confluence is the following - permissions on pages are inherited in a tree-like manner, parent to child. A reindex wasn't done and at some point child pages with sensitive information became viewable to every user because the permissions were not re-applied.
I would absolutely never rely on the permissions in Confluence to store anything sensitive in it ever again.
Yeah, we have a corporate policy of never storing anything critically sensitive in an Atlassian product. Though, to be fair, we have the same policy for Slack and most of our tools; that stuff never leaves Amazon.
I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option. I looked at Quip but it felt more informal than I was comfortable in particularly the lack of ability to setup teams and permissions that way.
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.
My experience of Quip is very similiar to how you described Dropbox Paper (which I haven't used): write, get feedback with in-line comments, collaborate, and forget the whole thing. But it's nice, slim, and fast.