Looking for advice or others experience of using Confluence and Jira

[NeilM]

Hi.  I am trying to understand the relationship of Jira to Confluence and trying to understand whether to adopt either or both. I can see how nicely and tightly integrated they are, but I wondered abut cross-over or duplication of functionality.

For example there are several useful looking Confluence templates for software development - a collection of five - not looked at any others yet, but some of these appear to duplicate the way goals or product discovery issues would be managed inside Jira projects.

Grateful to anyone who can spare five mins to outline how they use these two Atlassian cloud based solutions together. Currently use Trello and OneNote and want to get something more scalealbe and better integrated. Trello lacks some important management features, such as process specification/control, admin control of board format (columns), swimlanes, and the ability to (easily) consolidate issues from multiple projects on one board. Also planning to integrate this system to MS Teams (which works well with OneNote).

[NeilM]

Another example are the Retrosepctive and the Daily Stand up templates in Confluence. How do these work if the Daily Standup process and Retrospective process in the Scrum project/sprint process in Jira Software are used?

Thanks for any help.

[Danno]

@NeilM the quick answer is Jira is like Trello and Confluence is OneNote. Jira is used for tasking work and Confluence is a documentation repository. They are very tightly coupled. I have not tried using OneNote alongside Trello to see how well you can integrate them.

[NeilM]

Thanks. I think I undersood that and it is helpful to have it confirmed .

I am wondering about any actual experiences of using the two together, and especially of things like Confluence templates. Are these in fact redundant if you make fullest use of the proceess and extra parts in Jira (such as Goals and Product Discovery, or Rotrospectives and Stand ups)

[Danno]

A great example is the Retrospective if you are using Scrum. You can create the retrospective in Confluence directly from Jira. This gives you an agenda for the retrospective meeting with the team using the data from the sprint. Don't think of it as a duplicate since it is documenting the sprint that just ended and any outcomes from it to use in the next planning session for a future sprint. You can also create future action item tasks in Jira (in any project) directly from Confluence.