# Confluence 38 Hacker News commenters recommended Confluence and 80 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 12 years (3 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended as a shared team wiki where everyone keeps documentation in one place; critics find it slow, with weak search and messy pages. ## Why people recommend it - Fast and responsive lately (4 comments): "their cloud rewrite which was apparently a bloat of JS libs and hundreds of requests even by Atlassian standards" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706118)) "both of which I've found to be snappy and responsive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711237)) "Confluence articles load very fast now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345764)) - One shared place for team info (3 comments): "The value of Confluence is when everyone uses it, so there’s one place to find info to answer questions like “why the hell did we do it this way?”" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480950)) "Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120137)) "why would you build a Knowledge Base when you can use Confluence" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089437)) - Good editor with interactive widgets (3 comments): "it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926503)) "I actually really like the Confluence editor experience." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580096)) "Confluence has a nice mermaid plugin." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574551)) - Works well with Jira and suite (3 comments): "My favourite is the confluence integration though, as I like to record a lot of worklog-style information in there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260402)) "Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343654)) "simply made diligent use of the full Atlassian suite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369623)) ## What people warn about - Slow and bloated (4 comments): "using confluence pages as the app state. The website is so bloated it takes like 20 seconds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137987)) "Confluence is slow but pretty simple, standard wiki otherwise." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123835)) "I find it slow, awkward, hard to find things (in the sense of the search tools being bad but also easy to put things in the wrong place)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404500)) - Search is poor (4 comments): "Often search doesn't find what I need easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835507)) "I find it slow, awkward, hard to find things (in the sense of the search tools being bad but also easy to put things in the wrong place)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404500)) "usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908142)) - Data used for AI training (3 comments): "By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833328)) "That's insane. Every single one of those things is highly sensitive and confidential information." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836533)) "They know Confluence is full of proprietary information. They are violating their client's trust" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841290)) - Messy pages and lost formatting (2 comments): "Some of the internal wiki was migrated directly to Confluence (and lost all formatting and internal links in the process)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417769)) "where information often gets quite messy and unmaintained over time (I've met a few of those gargantuan Confluence-installations)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386111)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [TiddlyWiki](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tiddlywiki.md): 19 recommend - [MediaWiki](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mediawiki.md): 15 recommend - [Outline](https://hackerapproved.com/p/outline.md): 10 recommend - [OzBrain](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ozbrain.md): 8 recommend - [DokuWiki](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dokuwiki.md): 6 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Confluence", https://hackerapproved.com/p/confluence/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).