Project Management - Confluence vs MS Project

Darquise Leblanc August 26, 2022

Are the Confluence templates, eg. Project Plan as good, better than MS Project. What are people using to manage projects. Is it still worthwhile to have a separate tool?

2 answers

1 vote
StephanieC August 26, 2022

Use of Confluence templates vs MS Project is like apples vs oranges. Each serves a separate purpose altogether. MS Project is GREAT for setting task dependencies and the ability to change one date that auto-updates all dependent task due dates. From my 20+ years of working with MS Project, those are the two key features of MS Project that is difficult to find in many project software programs.    

Confluence, on the other hand, is great for DOCUMENTING project artifacts. The templates are good out of the box, but remember they can be customized by confluence space with space templates. That said, My preference for documentation is custom templates in Confluence. 

While we sometimes use MS Project hand-in-hand with Confluence for Projects, MS Project is not the ideal solution for AGILE projects (even though they have tried to implement some Agile features), but Confluence works fine for either Agile or Waterfall projects since its mainly about documentation.

One way we use JIRA & Confluence together for projects is via JIRA & Confluence Dashboards and the filter results macro. You can create a JQL filter in JIRA from a project and display it in a Confluence page which dynamically reports issue status and any other data depending on the fields you expose. 

Of course there are many plugins you may consider to manage projects with all Atlassian systems (we also use Tempo for time tracking & billing, which brings budget management into the mix). 

Bottom line is - IMHO - you dont need MS Project with Atlassian systems UNLESS task dependencies and frequent schedule changes are critical to your project. But there is likely a plug-in for that as well. I believe Advanced Roadmaps in DC does a little of this. We will find out next year when we migrate there from Server :-) 

Darquise Leblanc August 26, 2022

Thank you - this if very informative!

You mentioned:

"One way we use JIRA & Confluence together for projects is via JIRA & Confluence Dashboards and the filter results macro." Can this be done with Jira Work Management or or only with Jira Software?

StephanieC August 26, 2022

Im not familiar with Jira Work Management so Im guessing only with Jira Software?

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Deleted user August 26, 2022

@Darquise Leblanc like say, Ferrari F40 vs Lamborghini farm tractor ... perhaps you would be better off comparing microsoft project, a very old and not very useful tool, with BigPicture or with other products such as Structure, which however run on Jira and not on confluence.

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