Confluence Whiteboards vs. Marketplace Diagram Apps: What's Your Experience?

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Have you switched from diagramming apps like draw.io or Gliffy to Confluence Whiteboards? What’s your experience?

I recently attended Team '24 in Barcelona, and there was a lot of buzz around whether to migrate from Marketplace diagramming apps to Confluence’s native whiteboards. Many attendees raised the question: "Why use a Marketplace app when I can use Whiteboards?"

Personally, I’m not super experienced with Confluence Whiteboards yet, but I’m currently using another app for creating interactive diagrams, which is something Whiteboards don’t support just yet.

I’d love to hear:

• Have you migrated from apps like draw.io or Gliffy to Confluence Whiteboards?
  • What’s the feedback so far? Any specific pros or cons?
• If you’ve decided to stick with your existing diagramming app, what made you stay?

[François Dambrine]

In my company we want to migrate from draw.io to confluence whiteboard.

Most use cases are covered. However, as confluence whiteboard does not have versionning nor history we cannot fully migrate our storymappings/roadmap boards.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Never considered versioning and if whiteboards support that... Insightful info. Hope they roll that out soon enough.

[James Rickards _Spark-Nel_]

In a past job, I moved around 3000 people, with general positive reception.

Currently I have a few people sticking  with Miro and Draw.IO. Mostly because they don't have time to learn a new tool, and also the lack of custom routing of lines makes it not quite appropriate for more complex technical diagrams.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Regarding those users who still use draw.io, I guess they are using it via a web app or a standalone desktop app? Looking just from a budgeting perspective if we're talking about Atlassian Marketplace apps which are used only by a couple of users.

[Karine VANEL]

For the moment, we are keeping draw.io because we have a lot of history and the libraries and customizations provided are still insufficient on the confluence whiteboard side. Our first step will be MIRO (less history to go over and features almost completely covered)

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Cheers for the insight @Karine VANEL - I've never used Miro but I know there are some integrations with Jira (and I guess Confluence). As for draw.io, I can relate as we need it for a complex interactive graph which isn't supported yet within whiteboards.

Anyway, whenever you decide to migrate/move from draw.io, I would love to hear the feedback on that as well.

[Adam Wicks]

As has been covered before - there is no way that we will be using Whiteboards at all while the highly restrictive licensing policy for anything other than a premium license is in place.   We have a large team, and cannot accept a scenario where only the last 3 whiteboards per user remain active, without any mechanism to re-open older whiteboards.   

Having been a loyal Atlassian customer for 10 years, we cannot understand this approach to licensing this new feature. 

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Ah yes. I completely forgot about that limitation for everything below Premium plan. I surely agree with this statement. Limiting whiteboards per site almost on the same level as limiting number of pages that can be created within a site or a space.

Based on that, it might be even cheaper to use third-party apps rather than pay for Premium 🤔