Confluence vs. Clearspace
July 9th, 2008by Jeremy Thomas
We recently had a debate over whether or not we should use Confluence as a replacement to twiki, our enterprise wiki. I used Confluence at my last company, and for the most part it worked well. It’s got a great set of plugins and an extensible architecture. Most of all, it has a “near out of the box” capability for migrating in twiki content making for a smoother transition.
But the UI sucks.
Oh yeah, and it’s not people focused. Well at least not as people focused as Clearspace. We use Clearspace externally, and through our relationship with Jive also have an enterprise license. So to me it was a no brainer that we’d rollout Clearspace instead of Confluence.
But before that would happen I had to show why the “people” element was important. All the sponsoring group wanted to do was provide a space to collaborate around content. They weren’t considering the serendipitous establishment of weak ties between disconnected employees, and that people connecting around shared interests would boost efficiency at a hard-to-measure macro level.
After several weeks of debating over email we’ve decided to go with Clearspace, to my joy. I’m stoked to start using it with my China team, to find out more about who they are as people, and for them to get a feel for who we are as people too.
The one point that’s hard to drive home, however, is that knowledge will always be federated. During my consulting career and even here I’ve consistently run into people who want to create a single repository that will house all important corporate information assets, and that said repository will be the single place for people to turn to to find information. Such was the impetus behind our original corporate wiki. Although we’re not there yet, I’m starting to convince people that Discovery must be the center point of our Enterprise 2.0 rollout.
In time, I hope.
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July 14th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
And how about something completely different? There are other games in town. eTouch SamePage has a dynamic enterprise wiki that competes with the 2 you’ve mentioned. You should check it out.
http://www.etouch.net/home/
July 15th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Jeremy, thanks for an inside look at a user-focused decision-making process when it comes to E2.0 solutions. Content-centric thinking typically misses all the great points you brought up. I forget who said this originally, but content is no longer king. Conversations are. Content is a byproduct of conversations.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Jeremy,
Sorry to hear that you decided to go with Clearspace because of your concerns with the Confluence UI. I hope you have looked at the significant UI improvements that came in Confluence 2.8. We now have more than 5000 customer and we realise that wikis have spread to user bases where ease of use is key to adoption. Keeping things simple and easy has always been one of our goals, but we are making it primary in our future releases.
On the Content vs People issue: we think both are important. You need important content on a wiki before people will collaborate. It isn’t all about people talking to each other, or else we have great solutions already in email, IM, Skype etc. The creation of content is a key task that people do with wikis and in the workplace, and it is content that people collaborate over. People are important and issues of reputation, trust, sharing, and connections are at the heart of the new world of collaboration, but content shouldn’t be forgotten about either. There has to be a balance.
Another very interesting point you mention that we are thinking hard about is ‘Discoverability’. I think that it is as important as you do. The two fundamental things that users do in the wiki is that they write things and then the find those things again and reference them. We think that making that intuitive and simple should be a key goal. Along with a concentration on the UI, we want to make it very simple for users to find things in their ever growing Confluence wikis. Make sure you keep an eye on us, we share a lot of the same concerns.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Adrian,
I think Gia’s point is spot on, that content is a byproduct of conversation. The difference between what Clearspace does out of the box, and what IM, email and Skype do, is that the conversation is recorded so others, through discoverability, can benefit from it.
Users who connect on a topic through, say, a blog post, might choose to start a wiki page on said topic. Or they might start a conversation based on a wiki page. The point is Clearspace affords both alternatives, and that was appealing to me.
I do like the extensibility features in Confluence, however. There is a large array of plugins that extend its base functionality. So, arguably, with customization, one could tailor Confluence to be more conversation-centric.
July 30th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
We just conducted a similar analysis for our environment and decided to go with Confluence + several commercial plug-ins rather than Clearspace. While it is true that Clearspace has a cool UI and plenty of people focused features that will help to drive adoption and build the community, we thought that Confluence was much stronger in the extensibility area and seemed to have a larger developer community focused on extending the core product. Clearspace had plug-ins, but nothing that we found particularly useful for our environment.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Jeremy,
While I agree with your decision, most of that agreement comes from gut feel using the products. Is it possible to get a more in-depth analysis on this?
July 30th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
@Thomas U I hear what you’re saying about extensibility, and if your organization has resources available to customize Confluence or investigate and install plugins that’s not a bad approach.
But fundamentally I find the Confluence UI to be very “old skool”, in my humble opinion. And ease of use through an intuitive UI is key to adoption by non-technical users.
So, to answer Jay’s question, the decision came down to simple fundamentals for me. Intuitive UI = low barrier to entry = participation. Despite all of the bells and whistles one can extend Confluence with, it’s the presentation of these features that I struggle with.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Yeah its a pity about Atlassian’s “old school” approach to UI. We use both Jira (atlassian) and Clearspace (jive) extensively at our company. We have considered Confluence before.
I think Atlassian should present LESS information to the user and make it more relevant and personalised “out the box”. Sure you can customize dashboards etc. But by default the user is overwhelmed. Discovery of more detailed information should be AJAXY and a split second away.
Also they should go for a more updated look and feel. The upside though is Atlassian’s products appear to be more powerful and extensible.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Well, Clearspace has a good, extensible architecture too, although there’s probably a stronger community around Confluence than Clearspace. This is likely due to the cost differential, where Confluence is significantly cheaper than Clearspace. This means there’s a broader spectrum of companies using clearspace, and this leads to a more diverse selection of extensions.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:52 am
thanks great imformation
October 10th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Thanks J, really interesting. Any suggestions for a free open source alternative for club / social group?
October 12th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Yeah man, I’ve been pretty interested in http://buddypress.org/ recently. It combines WordPress and bbpress with social networking.
July 20th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
My organization is going through the same issues right now – debating wheather to go with Jive SSO or an appliance that includes confluence, Jira and crowd.
I’m an advocate for JIVE because of the “people” factor and because I know first hand how easy it is to use and customize.
Just curious – it’s been a little over two years since your post – did you regret the decision? do you know how the two products compare now?
Any insight would be appreciated.