Standard or Free Plan? How are you managing your 3 active boards limit?

[Amanda Barber]

I'd love to hear how you or your team members with Confluence Free or Standard are managing the three active boards limit. (Have Premium? Sell me on the cost of the ugprade...) 

[John Funk]

I would also be interested in hearing how people are navigating that. Seems like the new public sharing capability has a lot of potential, too. 

[Sanjay Samani]

We are really struggling with it. We would prefer to be using whiteboards for our retros, but have dropped back to using normal Pages.

We are often having to ask colleagues to create Whiteboards for each other, so that we can keep our 3 editable. That's not really a sustainable way forward.

During beta we really loved Whiteboards, but the adoption of them really stalled with the feature going live and the 3 board limit coming into place. 

When considering whether to upgrade to Premium, we considered the cost of alternatives like Miro, that are more fully featured than the Confluence whiteboards. With Smart Links and being able to added Miro whiteboards into the Confluence page tree structure, the cost benefit of Premium vs Miro really wasn't stacking up. For our organisation, there's not enough in Premium that we need, other than the removal of the whiteboard limit. Whilst the per user cost of Premium vs Standard is cheaper than Miro, not all of our Confluence users need whiteboards. 

Having the same limit as the Free tier seems to be a little bit of a harsh way to treat paying customers. The middle pricing tier should be a middle functionality and capability tier also. 

[Richard Rance]

We did a similar comparison with the same result. 

A team will have a couple of whiteboards that they want to remain editable long term, like a roadmap and then a bunch of single use boards. Since your 3 active boards are defined as the last 3 created the people who created the long term boards can't create new ones. It would be a lot better if it was the last 3 edited instead. 

[Liz T]

We went back to using Lucid because the three active boards limit. Which is a bummer, because many of the non-tech people were excited about the whiteboards and how easy they are to use. But the limit is ridiculous! (I'm planning on playing around with the Microsoft Whiteboards as well.)

It would be helpful if we got 3 whiteboards per license, and they aren't tied to a user. For example, if a company has 100 Standard licenses, they get 300 whiteboards...period (but no limit as to how many active boards per user). You know there are some people that will never use them, while others will use several. That would encourage us to upgrade to Premium if we ran into that particular limit rather than 3 active boards per user. Or let us purchase a package of them to use as we see fit. But we're not paying twice the cost just to get some more whiteboards. 

Additionally, I don't think it's fair that Standard and Free have the same limit. 

[Sanjay Samani]

I really like that suggestion. 3 whiteboards per license, but not tied would be a good step forward over the Free tier.

[Andy Gladstone]

My understanding of the initial documentation released around whiteboards licensing was just this - multiply your # of licensed users by 3 and that is the amount of available whiteboards. That would have been ideal.

Instead, the implementation was 3 per user for that user. So we have 10 active people using whiteboards, 30 not and those 10 people only have 3 each instead of being able to tap into the pool of available, and in this case, completely unutilized whiteboards.

Admins should be able to assign the rights to specific users and move the 'whiteboard licenses' around.

[Adam Wicks]

Love the concept - very easy to use and useful for brain dump, but permanently locking the oldest once you are over 3 is ridiculous, unless I'm missing something?  Is there a way to select which 3 boards are active or are you tied to just the latest 3?  I even deleted a newer one, but didn't then free up the original...

If this is how it works then it's dreadful - and we are a paying customer with some 200 standard licenses.  Seems harsh to have the same limit and controls as the free instance - you'd expect more. 

[Mara Thene]

I have a follow up question here, as to how people are handling this, because we currently have an issue I am struggling to solve:

We have the Confluence Standard Plan for our organisation but I have some users that currently only own 2 whiteboards, but can't edit any whiteboards anymore:

They had owned three, opened a fourth of a colleagues to check something out, and suddenly they couldn't edit any of their whiteboards any more. We shifted ownership, we removed them from the spaces with the other whiteboards, but still the can't edit any of them. Has anyone else had an issue with this or an idea how to tackle this?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

So far, we are managing this by not using whiteboards. This is partially because I would only be using them for process flow diagrams, and I haven't had time to do this yet. My boss and I talked about adding this in our documentation (now that we're at that point) and have decided to make them in Visio.

[Sanjay Samani]

Likewise, I've started using Visio for process flows now, License is massively cheaper than taking the whole organisation to Confluence Premium. 

We have recently discussed moving back to standard Pages for retrospectives. 

Essentially the limit of 3 per user is driving us away from using the feature.