Confluence vs Notion

Question

I'm between the bark and the tree with Notion and Confluence. I really prefer Confluence, but Notion's unlimited toggle-feature (nested expands) is one of its 2 major pulls on me.

I love working with tables and merging cells and having other macros inside tables. And so it keeps bringing me back to Confluence. But those toggles/expands is such a BIG WANT for me. Works so well in Notion. @Confluence, bring it home please!

The other big Notion feature that sets it apart is that every element is independently movable and referancable. It is that referanceabililty that has us use tools like Confluence and Notion and Obsidian, rather than MS-word and PDF type docs. I want to create and update a piece of info in one single place and have it appear on other pages I reference it - Quicly and seemlessly. Confluence is halfway there with that. Still a way to go on it though. (Excerpt macros does not deliver on this)

As for the pull in both directions, there are other things at play of course (macros, naturally being a big one), but these 2 above mentiond aspects are the major matters for me. I'm after simplicity with little complexity and fast responsive behavior. An inherent challenge with cloud based apps, I know, but having these basic simple features natively available and using 3rd party macros sparingly, is what will make Confluence a greater joy, less peeking at other tools (e.g. Notion) for creation/mainteance ease.

C'mon guys at Atlasian. Make it happen, please.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

@Daniel Rykheer I am not familiar how expands work in Notion, but do you realize that there is a macro for that in Confluence? It may be just what you look for.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-expand-macro/

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

Hi @Daniel Rykheer

Content reuse has been a common feature of Confluence of ages. People use for text, images, etc. You can reuse content of entire pages or excerpts of pages. It works just fine with excerpts and page include.

I've used it successfully for tidbits like disclaimers to build giant pages to get around the size limit.

Also, speaking a content person... excessive macro nesting is just poor information architecture - there's usually zero reason to put an ordered list in a table cell.

Which is why I'm happy that Confluence abandoned those options in cloud as it often resulted in content overformatting atrocities in the Server environment.

John Funk · Answer

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for some of the comparisons! Have you opened a support ticket with Atlassian to request that feature? Would love to upvote that if there is a JAC ticket.

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/