![Ben S.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Ben S.") BS Ben S. Mission Systems Staff AI Engineer Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 12/10/2021 "Honestly, so confusing that I avoid using it at all costs." 0.5/5 What do you like best about Confluence? In principle, the confluence suite is designed to streamline project and program management. It is offered as a one-stop shop for all of the things you would want as a PM and as a member of the team: tasking, document management, archiving, software repo and versioning, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Confluence? Honestly, just about everything. If you sit down and login without any prior knowledge of the suite, it is so counterintuitive to perform anything that you basically have to take a class. I did 3 different courses on LinkedIn Learning, and still struggled to perform most any task. And most people in my groups were similarly confused, befuddled, and frustrated, so that many of the "helpful" PM ideas that Confluence offers, like shared notes, shared documents, or even Jira for tasking, were so awkward that we just stopped using it altogether. Let me give an analogy. I bought a hypersensitive camera to use on a telescope so I could project what it sees onto a computer. It is hand made, very expensive, and if you tune it correctly, what it shows on the screen takes everyone's breath away. BUT!!! Not one action that you would actually use is labelled in a way that makes sense. To make the image brighter, as just one example, you have to click a button labeled "IVD", for "increase voltage drop". The start-up procedure is super confusing, and half the time when you push a button, you have to fiddle with something else to compensate for something else that changed. Now, If you don't have a sheet next to you to translate, it is hopeless until you memorize everything. And a bunch of things that always happen together are left to the user to fiddle with separately. Without any offense to the designer, it all makes sense to him because he built it and wrote the interface. But there was no end user next to him to say "hey, I need to be able to use this, and what you are doing doesn't make any sense." The best way I can describe this suite is from this same analogy. It was created by specialized folks -- all of whom understand what it is and how it works and how you navigate everywhere -- but I don't think they had nearly enough real end users who \*are not\* software engineers (or the right analogs) managing its creation so that it is easy to use and intuitive from day one. I think many readers of this might counter "well, it makes perfect sense to me," but I bet that only happened after a huge learning curve." If you are trying to manage complex projects with multiple team members and many moving parts, how effective is it to have a product that is supposed to make everything easier, when the learning curve is so steep that a roomfull of Ph.D. scientists can't figure it out in a few hours? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Confluence solving and how is that benefiting you? We have tried using it to manage projects with multiple moving parts, including tasking, document creation, archiving meeting notes, and sharing with members of aligned teams on the larger program. One of our younger team members spent a week learning how to run the Jira board and had to do every keystroke for the rest of us, so we were able to manage tasking but when he left the group, we just stopped using it altogether. I tried archiving notes but no one could find them. We tried sharing a document for editing but just went back to emailing it around or using OneNote. In other words, the benefits were pretty few in the end, since we decided the time we spent wresting with this system wasn't worth the gains. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite See what 4249 reviewers think of Confluence 4.1 out of 5 ยท Verified reviews from real users [ Read all reviews ](https://www.g2.com/products/confluence/reviews)