‍What is Confluence?

Confluence is a team collaboration and knowledge-sharing tool created by Atlassian. It's designed to help teams create, share, and manage project documentation and knowledge in a single space. Confluence is widely used by development teams, particularly those already leveraging other Atlassian products like Jira, to track and document project workflows.

The platform is particularly valued for its deep integration with Jira, which makes it a favorite for software teams who need a centralized place for documenting project plans, meeting notes, product requirements, and other technical documentation. Its content management capabilities and ease of collaboration are strong selling points, making it popular in industries like software development, IT, and product management.

Key features of Confluence

1. Content collaboration

Confluence allows teams to collaborate on documents in real time. Users can create and edit pages, add comments, and share them with others for input and feedback.

2. Integration with Jira

One of the standout features of Confluence is its seamless integration with Jira, Atlassian’s project tracking tool. This integration allows development teams to document and track projects from planning to execution without switching platforms.

3. Page templates

Confluence provides a wide variety of pre-built templates for project management, marketing, HR, and other team workflows. These templates help teams structure information consistently and reduce time spent creating documentation from scratch.

Additional integrations

Besides Jira, Confluence also integrates with other popular tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Workspace, making it adaptable to a variety of workflows.

Who uses Confluence?

Confluence is best suited for teams in software development, IT, and technical product management. It’s most valuable to teams already using Jira, as the two tools are designed to work in tandem. However, teams looking for a simple documentation tool without a steep learning curve might find Confluence to be more complex than necessary.

Pros and cons of Confluence

Confluence offers a range of features, but like any tool, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here's a breakdown of what you can expect:

Pros

• Deep Jira integration: If your team uses Jira, Confluence provides an unmatched level of collaboration between project tracking and documentation.
• Real-time collaboration: Confluence’s ability to collaborate in real-time makes it easier for teams to edit documents simultaneously and streamline communication.
• Customizable templates: Teams can easily use pre-built templates to standardize documentation, saving time and ensuring consistency.

Cons

• Steep learning curve: Confluence is powerful but can be overwhelming for non-technical teams or those unfamiliar with Atlassian products.
• Costly for large teams: Confluence’s pricing can get expensive for larger teams, especially when combined with other Atlassian tools like Jira.
• Limited outside of tech teams: While Confluence excels in technical documentation, its complexity may make it less useful for teams that don’t need advanced project-tracking integrations.

Guru vs. Confluence

Both Guru and Confluence offer robust knowledge management capabilities, but they differ significantly in their approach and ideal use cases.

Guru’s strengths

• AI-powered knowledge management: Guru is designed to deliver accurate, verified information directly in your workflow through AI-powered search. Its ability to integrate with Slack, Teams, Chrome, and other tools ensures knowledge is always easily accessible.
• Knowledge verification: Guru offers unique features like verification workflows and trust scores, which ensure that the information in your knowledge base is always accurate and up to date​​.
• Ease of use: Unlike Confluence, which can have a steep learning curve, Guru prioritizes ease of use. It integrates into your existing workflow and reduces context switching, making it ideal for non-technical teams.

Confluence’s strengths

• Project management integration: For teams using Jira, Confluence offers seamless project tracking and documentation, which makes it a natural fit for software development and IT teams.
• Flexible templates: Confluence provides a broad range of templates designed to suit different departments, making it easier to standardize documentation across the organization.

Integration and user experience

Both tools offer strong integrations, but while Confluence excels in technical environments, Guru stands out for its accessibility and ease of use, especially for non-technical teams or those that need to organize and verify company knowledge quickly. Guru's AI-driven verification workflows and intuitive search capabilities allow users to find trusted, up-to-date information instantly without switching between apps​.

What customers are saying

At the time of this writing, with a 4.8 star rating, Guru ranked slightly higher than Confluence (4.5 stars). Let’s see what customers had to say about both tools:

“It might be overwhelming at first; there are plenty of options and personalization elements you can include, so you might think, ‘It is too much for me.’ But by watching a couple of YouTube videos, you will see how you can customize it to suit your needs and start using its powerful features.” (Capterra review)

“Guru is a Google for companies. Everything we need to know about the products, workflow processes, and explanations about a specific company - you can just use Guru. ” (Capterra review)

Conclusion: choosing the right tool for your team

Confluence is a solid choice if your team is already using Jira or if you're working in a highly technical environment where deep project documentation is a must. Its rich feature set and integrations with other Atlassian products make it an excellent tool for development teams.

However, if your focus is on creating an accessible, verified knowledge base for a wider team, and you need a tool that integrates effortlessly into your existing workflow, Guru is the better choice. Its AI-driven knowledge management and ease of use can save your team time and help them work more efficiently.

Consider what matters most to your team—whether it's powerful technical integrations or streamlined, verified knowledge management—and choose the platform that best aligns with your goals. Give Guru a try today!

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