Confluence vs Trello
Learn more about your options and pick the best tool for your team.
Unsure whether your company should use Confluence or Trello? Or perhaps both? You've come to the right place.
Both Confluence and Trello belong to the Atlassian product suite. Fundamentally, they are designed to be complementary products rather than competitors. Confluence is a collaborative documentation tool, while Trello is primarily a project management platform. They can be integrated with each other and used together, or they can be used separately.
In this article, we will take a closer look at both tools and examine their strengths and weaknesses to help you decide whether you need Confluence, Trello, or both.
Confluence and Trello compared
At their core, both Confluence and Trello are built to facilitate team collaboration, but that's where most of their similarities end. They are fundamentally very different tools — Confluence helps teams manage and collaborate on long-form content, while Trello mostly deals with project management and task tracking.
Since these tools essentially solve different problems, there is no objective "winner" between the two of them. Depending on your needs and requirements, one of them may be a much better fit for your team than the other — or you may decide to boost your productivity by integrating them and using them together.
In recent years, collaboration tools that combine project management and documentation are also becoming increasingly popular. If you're finding it hard to choose between Confluence and Trello, opting for such an all-in-one solution might be a viable alternative. This way, you can manage your knowledge, documents, and projects in one place, minimizing unnecessary context switching.
To make the most informed decision, let's first dive deeper into what Confluence and Trello have to offer, taking into account their strengths, limitations, notable features, pricing, and user reviews. We will also have a look at other alternatives you may want to consider.
Confluence
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $5/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.4/5
Like Trello, Confluence is a part of the Atlassian product suite. When it was first released back in 2004, it was meant to be an enterprise-grade documentation tool and a knowledge management system, however, it has since evolved into a more general-purpose collaboration platform. Today, you can use Confluence to set up your private wiki or internal knowledge base, create an employee handbook, collaborate on documents, take meeting minutes, and more.
Confluence does offer some limited task management features, however, collaboration around long-form content remains its primary focus. Smaller teams may use Confluence for both project documentation and project management, with no need for a dedicated Kanban-style project management tool like Trello. Trello, on the other hand, offers a much more generous set of specialized project management features, including Kanban boards, timelines, roadmaps, and more.
What users say about Confluence:
"After using this software for more than 18 months, I can definitely say, this is a great tool for technical documentation. If you are using other Atlassian products like Jira, Trello, then Confluence is an amazing solution for bringing all tools together. The only con I would say is its cost. It comes with an additional cost for every user who needs access, that racks up your monthly Atlassian bill pretty quickly."
Read our detailed review of Confluence to learn more.
Looking for more tools similar to Confluence? Check out this list of Confluence alternatives.
Trello
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $10/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
Trello joined Confluence in the Atlassian ecosystem when it was acquired in 2017. It's a simple yet flexible project management tool that has earned the loyalty of millions of customers over the years. Trello is best known for its iconic Kanban board, but it has recently added new ways to organize your tasks. Now, Trello allows you to visualize your work in dashboards, timelines, tables, calendars, and maps.
Trello can be used as a standalone productivity tool, or in combination with Confluence. As is the case with all Atlassian products, Trello and Confluence are tightly integrated with each other. Trello cards and boards can be easily embedded into Confluence pages, and Confluence pages can be attached to Trello cards.
What users say about Trello:
"Trello can often-times feel like the simpler version of Jira. That is good to some clients but it can also be a put-off to others that require a more robust solution to their needs. Thankfully, when a client realizes that Trello is not for them, Atlassian (parent company) is able to offer Jira/Confluence to cover their needs."
Looking for more tools similar to Trello? Check out this list of Trello alternatives.
Other alternatives
It should be mentioned that you don't have to choose between Confluence and Trello — there are other tools that bring together the best of both worlds.
For example, if you are looking for a more modern, simple, and fast solution that combines the best of Confluence and Trello in a single package, consider Nuclino. Nuclino is a unified workspace where you can bring all your team's work together, replacing both Confluence and Trello. You can use it to build your internal knowledge base, collaborate on documents in real time, manage your tasks and projects, and more.
Lightweight and minimal by design, Nuclino focuses on the essentials, doing away with clunky menus and rarely-used options. It offers a simpler and cleaner interface than both Confluence and Trello, and makes it easy for anyone to get started with the tool.
Every document in Nuclino can be collaborated on in real time. You can take notes, embed files, create task lists with due dates and reminders, add tables, code blocks, diagrams, and more. Comments and mentions can be used to exchange feedback, and related documents can be linked together.
Learn more about how Nuclino compares to Confluence: Nuclino vs Confluence.
Confluence vs Trello: Which tool should you use?
While both Confluence and Trello are team collaboration tools, in most cases, they're not great substitutes and can't be used interchangeably. If your team members like Atlassian products, want to get the most out of them, and aren't limited by their budget, using Confluence and Trello together may be the choice for you.
However, if you prefer something more modern and easy-to-use, consider exploring other alternatives, such as Nuclino. We hope this article has made your decision a little easier.
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