Confluence: Confluence vs Google Docs
Question
What are the advantages of Confluence compared to Google Docs?
Environment
Server / Cloud
Answer
Google Docs is great for individual documents but what if you need same footer information on pages? What if you need to reuse part of your content from documentation of one product or process in another? How do you avoid duplicating content and having to update multiple docs in Google Docs? What if a document seems to belong to more than one spot in your folder hierarchy - how do you decide where it should live? Confluence can solve all of these problems for you and more.
Both Confluence and Google Docs offer collaborative editing feature. However, Confluence has collaboration features that you won't find in file sharing systems. On Confluence, you'll be provided with @mentions, likes, and inline comments so your team can actually collaborate on the documentation. With inline comments, you can discuss a particular part of your content, agree on changes, and finalize your edits.
It's also easier to organize your content, using templates for a unified user experience, labels for content management and by creating spaces for different types of documentation. Note that the labels can also be searched (as well as the content of the pages), and you could create an index using a macro for example.
When it comes to storing and organizing your content, Confluence takes a more dynamic approach to content rather than strictly hierarchical one. You can create categories for spaces which allows you to add multiple labels to each space. In such way, single space can be in the category for a department or a division in your organization but also part of a product line for example. Also, with Confluence, you'll prevent duplicates, as the Confluence page that you see is always the last updated version. However, you can easily restore a previous version or see what has been changed between two versions.
In terms of privacy, in Confluence, you'll have granular permissions so you can restrict some spaces or pages to specific teams and make some other public, at your convenience.
Integration with Jira is also very strong. Both products are developed by Atlassian and we are always focused on building strong integrations between all of our products. Check out this documentation to learn more about it.
Finally, as Confluence can also be used as an intranet, users will be provided with personal spaces, where users will be able to find all the tasks that have been assigned to them, the Confluence pages that they've saved for later, and the drafts pages you're currently working on.
Additional information
- Try Confluence to evaluate it with your team
- See the different use cases for Confluence
- How to build Confluence spaces for any team or project