I didn’t realize how much Stockholm Syndrome I had with Confluence until we switched to using Notion for our game design documents. It’s fast and responsive, which somehow in 2021 Atlassian still hasn’t figured out how to replicate with any of their products.
Switching pages and search are infuriatingly slow on Notion. I still love the rest of it, but my god switch to using a local cache for searching or something please
If all you know is JIRA then Notion feels like a breath of fresh air. Like it's not fast, but I never really expected blinding speed since Notion pages are so dynamic. But it's also not JIRA's click on something then wait a few seconds for the UI to catch up on a many thousand dollar laptop.
After fighting the move to Jira/Confluence for years, my company finally migrated away from Notion & Clubhouse. I couldn't be happier. Notion was great when we were <5 people, but it feels like a toy compared to Confluence.
What am I missing out on? I get Confluence has lots of enterprisey features for sysadmins but as an author it has always been a terrible experience, especially for code. There's so much friction to actually creating documentation that nobody actually does it or if they do never bother to update it.
With JIRA and Confluence, there is never just one JIRA or Confluence. It really comes down to the configuration. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different configuration options that could be built into your particular implementation which may make it sing, or make it like a bad CAFO.
I’ve been part of a team doing JIRA and Confluence configuration. We saw on,y the tiniest bit about the configuration process required to make it work, and we slammed that hood right back down and decided we were never going to look under there again. Well, not ourselves. But we did hire a JIRA and Confluence expert to come in and help us make it as optimized as we could get.
I’ve also been a customer of bad JIRA and Confluence configurations. And when they’re bad, they can be really bad. But, as a customer, you don’t have any control over those system configuration options.
It’s like saying that a hammer is bad. Well, which hammer did you use? There are dozens or hundreds of different types of hammers out there. How did you use this hammer? What did you use this hammer on? Where did you use this hammer? Were you trained in how to use it properly? Did you actually use it properly, or were you using it in a way that was not consistent with its design?
Confluence's biggest value to me is on the Product/Project Management side of things, not necessarily code documentation. Being able to embed Figma docs, client requests .docx files, link to tables/epics/issues, and produce Gantt charts all in one place has been absolutely critical to taking our team from "boutique software studio" to "fast-growing product agency."
I find it brutally slow. At first I was a big fan but over time I've mostly stopped using it because I just couldn't stand how slow it is (using it in browser on a laptop).
I hang on in the hopes they will address the problem.
Confluence is too often used in use cases it was not design for. That includes being used by companies with less 50 people. This probably contributes to its criticisms. But Confluence will almost always beat Notion when the company reach more than 150 people.
None that I'm aware of. Thing to understand is that Notion and Confluence are vastly different products.
Notion is more for sharing a set of documents that are often used. And thus create some hierarchy of content without right management or structure. Works well if you are business owner or a team, or a small company. Or if you want to onboard noob users into documenting their work. And Notion is very good at that
Confluence works better to manage a lot of documents, give rights, structure content, organize. Confluence is not very good at it, but this is a difficult task and competitors don't do better
So depending on where you are at, you can pick the one which suits you best. They are others less popular tools than Confluence and Notion but still are in the two categories described above
