Confluence
The most recommended of 9 wiki software
Recommended as a shared team wiki where everyone keeps documentation in one place; critics find it slow, with weak search and messy pages.
Recommended as a shared team wiki where everyone keeps documentation in one place; critics find it slow, with weak search and messy pages.
118 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 38
- criticize it
- 80
- approval share
- 32%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 12 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 38 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast and responsive lately
“their cloud rewrite which was apparently a bloat of JS libs and hundreds of requests even by Atlassian standards”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Curl removes bug bounties because of AI slop” “both of which I've found to be snappy and responsive”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Curl removes bug bounties because of AI slop” “Confluence articles load very fast now.”
Comment from 12 Mar 2026 in “Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI” - Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Curl removes bug bounties because of AI slop”
One shared place for team info
“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?””
Comment from 22 Mar 2026 in “Atlassian Says It Had Right to Fire Engineer for Suggesting CEO Is 'Rich Jerk'” “Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon.”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “10 years of writing a blog nobody reads” “why would you build a Knowledge Base when you can use Confluence”
Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file” Good editor with interactive widgets
“it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “France's homegrown open source online office suite” “I actually really like the Confluence editor experience.”
Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering” “Confluence has a nice mermaid plugin.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “I use excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog” Works well with Jira and suite
“My favourite is the confluence integration though, as I like to record a lot of worklog-style information in there”
Comment from 5 Mar 2026 in “Googleworkspace/CLI” “Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI” “simply made diligent use of the full Atlassian suite”
Comment from 13 Mar 2026 in “How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow and bloated
“using confluence pages as the app state. The website is so bloated it takes like 20 seconds”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “The Emacsification of Software” “Confluence is slow but pretty simple, standard wiki otherwise.”
Comment from 16 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: Why do developers hate Confluence?” “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)”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Does Confluence still suck today?” - Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Curl removes bug bounties because of AI slop”
Search is poor
“Often search doesn't find what I need easily”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?” “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)”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Does Confluence still suck today?” “usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Just Let Me Write Digits” - Comment from 23 Mar 2026 in “Atlassian Says It Had Right to Fire Engineer for Suggesting CEO Is 'Rich Jerk'”
Data used for AI training
“By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training.”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Atlassian Enables Default Data Collection to Train AI” “That's insane. Every single one of those things is highly sensitive and confidential information.”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Atlassian Enables Default Data Collection to Train AI” “They know Confluence is full of proprietary information. They are violating their client's trust”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Atlassian Enables Default Data Collection to Train AI” Messy pages and lost formatting
“Some of the internal wiki was migrated directly to Confluence (and lost all formatting and internal links in the process)”
Comment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Pre-commit hooks are fundamentally broken” “where information often gets quite messy and unmaintained over time (I've met a few of those gargantuan Confluence-installations)”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Show HN: GitHub Pages for Agents with GitHub Agentic Workflows (Gh-Aw)”
Other wiki software people recommend
The four most recommended other wiki software, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ConfluenceThis page | 38 | 80 | 32% | 11 | 12 yrs3 owners | — |
| TiddlyWiki | 19 | 1 | 95% | 7 | — | Approved |
| MediaWiki | 15 | 9 | 63% | 8 | 6 yrs3 owners | — |
| Outline | 10 | 0 | 100% | 7 | — | Approved |
| OzBrain | 8 | 4 | 67% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 132 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Confluence is slow but pretty simple, standard wiki otherwise.”
“I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc.”
“we just ended up with two wikis with lots of tech info on the old one and lots of marketing info on Confluence”
“it's difficult to find worthy competitors to Confluence”
“endless Confluence Wiki pages that are clearly written by Claude”
“usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser”
“it works great for me - but I've started migrating off due to this policy”
“docs in Google Docs / Notion / Confluence, mocks in Figma, etc.”
“using confluence pages as the app state. The website is so bloated it takes like 20 seconds”
“They know Confluence is full of proprietary information. They are violating their client's trust”
“That's insane. Every single one of those things is highly sensitive and confidential information.”
“By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training.”
“I don’t love Confluence, but at least it doesn’t do this to me.”
“Confluence has a nice mermaid plugin.”
“A graphical docs portal like Confluence is a hell of a lot easier to use than EMacs”
“If any half-competent developer tried to write his first search engine it would be better than that of Confluence.”
“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?””
“where information often gets quite messy and unmaintained over time (I've met a few of those gargantuan Confluence-installations)”
“It is NOT easier to author, comment on, label, view history of, move without breaking links, etc.”
“simply made diligent use of the full Atlassian suite”
“Confluence articles load very fast now.”
“they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years”
“Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence”
“My favourite is the confluence integration though, as I like to record a lot of worklog-style information in there”
“posting a confluence page or a markdown doc on slack doesn't really get any traction”
“vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by removing the self-hosted options”
“it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets”
“What we pay for JIRA and Confluence would never offset”
“Often search doesn't find what I need easily”
“won't be as in depth as specialized software (e.g. Jira / Confluence)”
“both of which I've found to be snappy and responsive”
“The on-prem self-host Confluence I've used is still pretty snappy and pleasant to use”
“their cloud rewrite which was apparently a bloat of JS libs and hundreds of requests even by Atlassian standards”
“It's very responsive for me.”
“I actually really like the Confluence editor experience.”
“Some of the internal wiki was migrated directly to Confluence (and lost all formatting and internal links in the process)”
“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)”
“Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon.”
“previous iterations were confluence, then markdown on github”
“why would you build a Knowledge Base when you can use Confluence”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.