What is Confluence exactly?

[Deleted user]

I'm getting a bit confused as to what Confluence is. Is a documentation tool, knowledge management tool, enterprise content management tool....etc.? In fact, are all these functions synonymous, or does each of them differ?

Would appreciate some clarity here.

Many thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It's a wiki, so it is for all of those things, and more.

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

Confluence, imho, is a content collaboration platform: Everyone (in a team, a company,...) can create, modify & comment on content. Content is stored in pages as text, tables, images, videos, links, files & additional features (eg. reports or specific functions added by addons). You can probably do all the things you mentioned above.

Confluence allows you to work on pages together at the same time (Real time collaboration), you can mention coworkers, define tasks & share a page: Confluence notifies your users the way they prefer by mail or by in-app notification. All changes on content are automatically version & you can compare & jump back to an older version, if needed.

But you always have control of your content by giving permissions on spaces, which define a place to store content of a certain topic. The pages in a space can then be restricted to be readable or editable by certain users or groups.

Confluence offers interfaces and extension points, so you can automate many processes from other programs & applications (Automatically create/modify pages...).

So, Confluence can be used for many ideas, it depends what you need, try & like...

In our company Confluence is our social intranet, knowledge base, reporting frontend, project & meeting planning & documentation, basic task planner,...

Hope that give you an idea.

You might want to check:

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

Best

JP

[Tobias Anstett _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I totally agree to Jan-Peter.

For its own Confluence is already an awesome product and supports so many use cases.

However using apps from the Atlassian Marketplace will extend it even further – either by supporting new use cases or adding missing functionality for a vertical.

Referring to your question - sure there is a difference between a documentation tool, knowledge management tool, enterprise content management tool ... however Confluence + Apps will allow you to do all of this.

Talking about documentation - a lot of customers use Confluence to write documents (similar to word files) but also technical documentation such as product documentation etc. with Confluence (usually customer facing at some point in time).

Talking about knowledge management - this is about managing the knowledge of your team e.g. describe processes, on-boarding, specifications, etc. all the assets which are valuable for your company and must be made available to your company or teams in a transparent way.

Hope this helps,

Best, Tobias