Confluence - Why choose Confluence?

This is a question we get asked a lot: with so many Open Source wikis out there, why would anyone choose Confluence? The short answer is that Atlassian wrote Confluence because we couldn't find a wiki that did everything we needed it to do...and if we couldn't find one, we were pretty sure there were other people in the same situation as us.

Other than our 12 months of our legendary support included with all of our commercial and academic licenses, if you pick any one feature from the list below, you'll probably find a couple of free wikis that do the same thing. However, the more features you pick from the list, the sooner you'll find that Confluence is what customers really need.

For users:

• Attractive and helpful user interface
• Very flexible page markup, from simple bold and italic markup to tables, columns, or even colourful notes
• Full edit history for every page
• Hierarchies (parents and children) as another way of organising pages
• The ability to comment on a page if you don't want to edit it
• Store multiple versions of attachments on any page
• Powerful Full text search of the whole site, including any Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF documents you may attach to pages.
• Email archiving
• Export any page to PDF (for emailing, or just keeping as a document)
• Export the entire wiki to PDF or static HTML
• Rename or move a page, and all links to it are automatically updated
• Blogging (news) support
• RSS support
• Email notifications of changes
• Image galleries and thumbnails
• JIRA integration (if you're not using JIRA already, you should be)

For developers:

• Full source access with every commercial license
• Plugins and macros allow you to customise the wiki, and integrate it with other systems
• Comprehensive remote API (XML-RPC and SOAP)

For administrators:

• User management, security and permissions built in from the ground up
• Host multiple wikis (spaces) on the same site
• Customiseable look-and-feel with drop-in "themes"
• Support for LDAP authentication
• Very simple "unzip and run" setup for the standalone version
• Compatibility with a wide range of operating systems and databases
• Free 30 day no-strings-attached demo
• Not a hosted solution - you can keep your own data behind your own firewall (Although if you want someone to host Confluence for you, we can tell you who to call)
• Remote API allows you to script routine administrative tasks
• Legendary support from the helpful folk at Atlassian

And they're just the tangible advantages of Confluence. Confluence's big advantage over most other wikis is that every day, there's a team of developers being paid to do nothing but make Confluence better. Confluence is what we do! We like to think we mix the best lessons of open development with commercial software:

• You get the source-code.
• We release new versions and new features frequently.
• Our developers are accessible.
• We have nothing to hide from our customers: they can follow what we're doing on our public issue-tracker.

At the same time, we never forget that we get to make this cool software only because people want to use it: we're developing Confluence for our customers, not for us. We're constantly listening to our customers for ways to make Confluence better.

As good as we think Confluence is, we continue to improve it at a pretty hectic pace. 1.0 was well worth buying. 1.4 was three times as good, 2.0 brought even more to the table including WYSIWYG editing, and 2.2 includes personal spaces, support for internationalisation, spam protection, new extension points for plugin developers, a simple LDAP configuration syntax, and more. We have even more features waiting on the whiteboard (did I mention the year of free upgrades?) that are going to blow you away.

I also recommend having a look at our Confluence customer list, customer testimonials and PDF brochure: