Confluence vs a Wiki: Which Is Better?
Learn more about your options and pick the best tool for your team.
As your business grows, it accumulates a wealth of valuable information – industry know-how, best practices, customer knowledge, and so on. After a while, keeping all that information in your cloud storage, such as Google Drive or Dropbox, becomes impossible and you find yourself in need of a dedicated knowledge sharing tool to keep things organized.
There are many options to choose from. Atlassian Confluence is a popular platform that often makes it to the shortlist. It's a mature and reliable solution trusted by over 60,000 teams and businesses. Other companies, on the other hand, prefer to organize internal information in a more conventional wiki format.
But what's the difference and how do you pick the right tool for your team? In this article, we will take a closer look at every option you have.
What is Confluence?
Confluence is one of the oldest online collaboration tools on the market. It was launched in 2004 and has since accumulated thousands of loyal customers.
Like most wikis, Confluence allows users to collaboratively create, organize, and edit content online. Related pages can be linked together using internal links, making it easy to explore your content. While Confluence is not designed like a traditional corporate wiki, it provides all the tools you may need to build your internal wiki.
What is a wiki?
Internal wiki example (Nuclino)
Wiki software is a rather broad product category that encompasses many different tools. The first-known wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1994.
While wikis can also be public – such as Wikipedia or Wikia – in this article, we will focus on private wikis that are used by teams and organizations to share information privately among their members. Examples of popular private wikis include Nuclino and MediaWiki.
Confluence vs a wiki
So which is better, Confluence or a wiki like Nuclino or MediaWiki? The answer depends on your organization's unique requirements.
Confluence is an exceptionally powerful and versatile tool. It also seamlessly integrates with other products in the Atlassian suite, making it a natural fit for teams that already use tools like Jira or BitBucket.
But it's not without its shortcomings. Over the years, it has been suffering from feature creep, adding numerous options, menus, and settings. Most of them are rarely used and geared towards large enterprises. Today, more and more teams find Confluence too overengineered, complex, and slow to be used effectively, leading to out-of-date content and low engagement:
"Confluence is not easy to use. All the places where I've used it, the information hasn't been up-to-date and people have preferred to work in some other tool before transferring info to Confluence. The last step is usually forgotten."
— Paul T., CTO (Capterra)
Let's take a closer look at how popular wiki tools measure up to Confluence.
Confluence vs Nuclino
Nuclino is an exceptionally lightweight and fast wiki and one of the most popular Confluence alternatives. While it's not as feature-packed as Confluence and some other wiki platforms, it focuses on the essentials and provides a frictionless experience.
Why you might prefer Nuclino over Confluence:
Nuclino is simple and easy-to-use, with a minimal learning curve for new users.
Every interaction in Nuclino is optimized for speed: no page loads, instant search, real-time sync, Markdown commands, and shortcuts.
Nuclino offers a clean, uncluttered interface and intuitive navigation.
Nuclino provides a seamless collaboration experience with real-time editing, comments, and mentions.
Why you might prefer Confluence over Nuclino:
Confluence offers a wider range of formatting and layout options.
Confluence is tightly integrated with Jira and other Atlassian products.
Unlike Nuclino, where all content is editable by default, Confluence has a draft mode, making it easier to prevent accidental edits.
Confluence offers an API.
Learn more about how Nuclino compares to Confluence: Nuclino vs Confluence.
Confluence vs MediaWiki
MediaWiki powers some of the largest wikis in the world, including Wikipedia, and for a long time had been the wiki software of choice for companies, students, and hobbyists alike.
In recent years, however, its popularity has been declining, with more and more users migrating their content to modern wiki platforms that offer a more intuitive interface, faster search, and real-time content editing capabilities.
Why you might prefer MediaWiki over Confluence:
MediaWiki is an open-source, free wiki platform.
MediaWiki is available as a self-hosted solution.
MediaWiki is highly flexible and customizable.
MediaWiki supports over 60 languages.
Why you might prefer Confluence over MediaWiki:
Confluence has a more user-friendly WYSIWYG editor.
Confluence has a more modern and intuitive interface.
Confluence offers a better collaboration experience, including comments and mentions.
Confluence integrates well with other Atlassian offerings like Jira.
Looking for more tools similar to MediaWiki? Check out this list of MediaWiki alternatives.
So which is better, Confluence or a wiki?
There is no objective winner when you compare Confluence to other wiki tools. Every solution has its own strengths and weaknesses and the best choice depends on your organization's unique requirements. Large companies appreaciate the extensive enterprise feature set of Confluence, while startups and smaller teams often prefer the ease-of-use and speed of modern wikis such as Nuclino.
Whatever tool you choose, make sure to allocate enough time to thoroughly evaluate it together with your team. We hope this article made your decision a little easier.
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