Plan Changes - Whiteboards Crippled for Paying Users

[Matt Richards]

@Jonno Katahanas @Christina Ristevski @Daniel Simmonds 

I'm hoping that you are still collecting feedback about the upcoming plan changes, and that room remains for you to reconsider what I believe to be a short-sighted decision that negatively impacts paying customers.

I understand the need to drive conversions to paid Confluence tiers, and as a paying user on the Standard plan I also understand that I should not expect the same capabilities offered to Premium subscribers. I also believe that it is acceptable to significantly limit the capabilities of the product for those on the Free plan, who are not paying. 

That being said, the limit of three "active" boards per user for the Standard plan is too restrictive. Being able to freely create boards is essential to adoption.

Limiting the number of boards is appropriate for Free plan users. It makes sense to give non-paying users a taste of functionality within a severely limited experience, and to create a strong motivation to convert to a paid plan. 

What makes no sense to me is the upcoming limit on active boards to paying users. By all means take the smart sections and connectors, and any other advanced feature work you have coming down the pipe, and put that behind the Premium paywall, but don't limit the number of active boards! Doing this prevents us from establishing Whiteboards as a central part of our workflows and undercuts the very momentum that would drive us to a Premium plan for advanced features. 

This simply doesn't make sense! Please reconsider the board limit for Standard users and let us continue to advocate for your product within our organizations. If you do not, users will be forced to reconcile a significant cost increase for Confluence (2x for us) against Miro or FigJam. I believe that Whiteboards' proximity to Confluence documentation and Jira process is a MASSIVE benefit, but frankly on a feature by feature basis, most of the other people in our organization will argue that Miro or FigJam are better investments. 

Again, please reconsider!

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For those who have yet to see how the upcoming changes will negatively impact the product and cause huge issues for paid users, see this:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/understand-confluence-whiteboards-plans-and-features/

[Keith Sottung]

@Matt Richards Bravo! Very well argued. One point I like to underline in your argument that Atlassian sometimes forgets is that users like you and me are constantly in a battle to justify Atlassian products to the business. It takes a long time to seed the merits of Atlassian functionality and to excite the masses to move it from one tier to the next.  I think our argue drives home the point to design tiers that will bring more users in so the next conversation is "what is next" than "that's nice" but since I'm limited I am going to move on and use something else. I grant that this must be difficult for Atlassian but they must find the smart balance between creating a desire to want more and pay for it from that's nice, shame I can't entrench it in to a standard process.  Good luck. Great post. 

[Matt Richards]

Thanks, Keith! I'm hoping other will contribute their thoughts!

[Chris Prince]

It looks like my options are

a) double my per-user costs for the entire user base of confluence,

b) deal with a very low maximum active whiteboard count that users will hate,

or c) disable whiteboards

My only logical answer is to disable access to whiteboards and seek an alternative solution for the 10 users who love this feature. 

[Matt Richards]

Yeah, it's a bad situation. I'm currently evaluating FigJam, which has Jira and Confluence integration and doesn't double our costs.

[Mihail Iliev]

We were migrating from Miro to Whiteboards...but now it seems we are going to scratch this plan. We are using Figma and right now we are also evaluating FigJam. It seem the balance between functionalities and price is really good there.

[Keith Sottung]

I just want to point out that SaaS product pricing will always be reasonable... until it is not. :-) You can depend on that, just as the sun will raise in the morning. 

[Matt Richards]

First thing yesterday morning I met with our leadership team, as we do every Monday morning. This group includes every decision maker across the organization. I have introduced whiteboards to each of them, and we use them actively in our leadership discussions, and throughout our process.

On this Monday we arrived to discover that many of us had been locked out of our individual whiteboards. To make matters worse, the only option we were given to unlock our whiteboards was to have the whiteboard we use to run the meeting become locked. We have no way to see how many whiteboards we have created, or understand which are locked or unlocked, let alone manage their state. We don't even know if it's three whiteboards per user or for our entire organization. 

I have been introducing, advocating for and implementing Atlassian tools in our organization for the last year. In an instant all of that progress was lost. 

Today we begin the process of looking not just for a whiteboards replacement, but for a way to use Linear in place of Jira, and to integrate it with a new documentation system in lieu of Confluence.

I've been using Atlassian software for 14 years at companies I worked for, founded and advised. No company or its products are ever perfect, but this is flagrantly bad.

[Mattias Hallqvist]

I can only agree this was a really douche move of Atlassian.
I even wonder if it's legal??
You're on a paid plan, they give you a tool that you start using extensively, then they lock the tool and say you have to pay more to use it? It's like kidnapping.

If this was the plan from start it should have come with a big fat warning sign on it, saying it will be limited later. I didn't even see any info that they were gonna limit it at all, just suddenly it's all locked (well all but 3 old whiteboards).

It would make more sense if they limit the amount of content you can put on whiteboards, since that will have actual impact on their serves, but the amount of whiteboards? That's just greedy. Plain ol' greed.

Shame on Atlassian!

EDIT: Actually, there's already a cap on content for standard plan.

[Brian Walker]

On top of the fact that they inadvertently 'forgot' to put in an exporting capability!

[Matt Richards]

I'm certainly not going to look at the new "databases" feature until production pricing is clear. Can't get burned again.

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

I right away asked our users if they are affected by the 3-Board-Limit. Answers were clear: Especially with the lack of possibility to decide on what 3 boards stay active, Whiteboards will be rendered useless for most.

We were trying to move away from Mural for internal Use Cases (awaiting external collaboration features), but we won't be saving a penny now, as we will have to Upgrade to Premium. 

[Matt Richards]

Have you looked at FigJam at all? 

[simon]

100% came looking for others in the same boat. I thought Whiteboards were awesome when introduced in beta. Fairly limited compared to tools like Miro, but built into our Confluence hierarchy, made for a great tool for diagraming things out.

Have created a number of business critical diagrams with them.

Just jumped in to do some editing and get messages telling me I need to upgrade to Premium to be able to edit them.

What a ridiculous limit.

3?

Atlassian, this makes them 100% useless on any plan but Premium. And we have zero wish to upgrade to Premium.

A terrible decision.

[keerthi]

Pretty big hit to our workflows. My understanding was that each person can only own up to 3 active whiteboards but everyone can collaborate on each other's whiteboards.

Now we have completely lost the benefit of collaboration as many of the whiteboards have become view-only.

Under the standard plan, this seems highly restrictive

[Moritz Tenorth]

I had the same understanding, and while we were really happy to be able to use whiteboards and wanted to use them more, this renders them useless for us given the massive price step towards Premium.

[Tere Pile]

100% agree with points made by both  @Matt Richards @Keith Sottung not much to add!

[Darius]

Just got back from holiday excited to catch up on feature releases. What alternate reality is this?

3 active boards is incredibly reductive and anti-customer on the Standard plan. We are talking about an exceedingly limited beta product that still has no option for import, export, print, or even external sharing. And you want to pay wall it behind Premium?  

This completely derailed my attempt at migrating all our users from Miro to Whiteboards. We can pay less for MIRO than premium would cost a get significantly more added value. 

I'm in the same boat and of the same opinion as others here. Restrict free users, but limiting to 3-active boards for Standard is aggresively anti-customer. 
I've spent cumulatively many days worth of hours building flow charts in Whiteboards and using them to drive adoption of Confluence. Now most of them are locked. 

@Matt Richards 
+1 for ignoring any time investment into the Databases beta, (or any new features for that matter) until the pay walls are transparent.  

This has caused a big loss of trust of Atlassian by our internal team. 

Hopefully some of the active Atlassian Team members in this group will chime in to at acknowledge peoples grievances. 

Im still hoping this was just badly thought out and open for re-assessment. Its an incredibly 'not Atlassian' way of doing things. 

@Corné Alant @Scott Le @Carmine Comparone @bhi @Natalie Johnson @Jonno Katahanas 

[Darius]

The silence is deafening. Im not sure my message was worth the effort if after more than 2 months, @Jonno Katahanas @Christina Ristevski @Daniel Simmonds still haven't responded to or coordinate some kind of approved response to @Matt Richards  original message and the many messages that followed here and in other places.

Not even a "We hear you and are discussing the topic".
Just silence.
Which probably means Atlassian management is completely indifferent to how damaging this move is. 

[Lynne Wilton]

Have just discovered this morning that boards owned by unlicensed users (leavers) automatically lose edit access too. As boards cannot be reassigned like other content, this it yet another unnecessary  manual task for users to deal with (copy & paste! it's the 21st century!!)

[Lynne Wilton]

Absolutely agree with everything you have said here @Matt Richards . Good to know I am not alone in trying to placate our inhouse whiteboard users before they run off to use an alternative tool.

We appear to have a limited number of users who need to have edit access to multiple boards at a time.

Maybe a solution for Standard planners is to have an overall limit of boards based on the number of users we have. We were previously working on the assumption that this was what was being rolled out and had a process in place to manage it.

[Matt Richards]

We adopted early and it was a bit hit. On Monday we were burned badly by that decision when users across our organization were hit with the limit with no way to see how many whiteboards we have created, or understand which are locked or unlocked, let alone manage their state. The fallout has been horrific. 

[Brian Walker]

Very disappointed that I can't control the active whiteboards on Confluence.  

  We will now go back to the Miro boards, which has the functionality we require and is cheaper than premium for whiteboard sessions.

[Liz T]

I agree with you @Matt Richards! We had people who started using them (myself included) and were very excited - until we bumped into the limit on active boards.

Now we are forced to go back to using Lucid - which bums out several of us because we were using the Confluence Whiteboards to help plan out workflows and processes related to our use of other Jira Products (Jira Service Management and Jira Product Discovery). We were linking to our Whiteboards and people were loving that. Limiting us to 3 active boards per person really hampers further adoption.

It would be helpful if instead we got 3 boards per Confluence license. For example, if on the Standard plan with 100 users, the account would be given 300 Whiteboards (so not limited to 3 per user as some users may NEVER use them and other may create many). Then we'd need to upgrade the account to get more Whiteboards after 300. That way, there is a much better chance of convincing management of the need for an upgrade, because so many boards would be in use.

[Matt Richards]

Thanks for your reply, Liz! Unfortunately Atlassian has signaled that they are not looking to change this decision at this time. Post like yours, which bring evidence to table, are the only way to convince them otherwise. 

[Mattias Hallqvist]

I've been in contact with support and got the recommendation to make a copy of a whiteboard to make it active again. No control of what other whiteboard will be locked instead, but at least possible to unlock the whiteboard you need.

They have this ticket going. Perhaps it can be used to put some pressure.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-77808

[Darius]

Since this topic has been ignored by Atlassian staff for several months, I've taken the initiative to create a post in the main Confluence Community. This seems like a reasonable move, particularly since the feature is out of Beta. 

Please upvote it to help the topic gain traction.

Is Atlassians selectively ignoring criticisms of W...

I tried tagging several people but it wouldn't allow me as the tags were detected as 'malformed html code'. 

Namely Mattias Hallqvist and Rebekka Heilmann. It was impossible to tag them (I did tag a recently created alt for Rebekka using underscore instead of brackets).