My organization has spent years reaping the benefits of a dedicated Confluence server. What are the benefits/weaknesses of migrating to Confluence Cloud?
There are many benefits in doing so, one of them is that you will no longer have to run software updates, keep backups and disaster recovery plans, no longer performance tuning and your cloud instance will be updated continuously not only for new and improved features but also when a security issue may be found.
Our customers running on cloud, including those who migrated from Confluence server on premise, are happy with the outcome of the product. The only negative point that you may find is that perhaps you have an application on server that is not yet available on the cloud or it will never be. You will need to check that before taking the decision.
Adding to what Claudio said, Atlassian has rebuilt the Confluence editor experience to make it more aligned with new standards and design so you will have a better user experience. They are also adding new features constantly, which is making the product much more user friendly, specially when using tables. There is a small learning curve and people should keep that in mind when switching from one platform to the other and embrace all the great new features Confluence Cloud provides.
You can find a post with some of the new features in the link below.
I agree with Rodolfo - the user experience is very nice and I found learning intuitive. I would say take the time to learn the editor keyboard shortcuts as that goes a long way to making working on pages even easier. I happen to love the "/" command to access macros. Here's a great little quick video on high level features:
To add to what Claudio said about not all Apps migrating, another weakness is there will be manual work with migrating to cloud, both before migration and after, so be prepared to set aside time and resources for that.
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October 27, 2023 edited
Cloud is getting investment, on-prem not so much, the UI is night and day so I agree with @Lisa Gleinzer.
We build app and the integration between Jira and Confluence in cloud is better and improving. Users want to move from one to another with ease.
But you can't do as much customization, we built a suite of tools called Space Content Manager and we found out the limits quickly. That said it means longer term easier to manager.
Unless you can justify the major Data Center premium (few can) then given the cost, the rate of improvement and longer term benefits with cloud it's a no brainer in my view.
