Perfect Wiki vs Atlassian Confluence: Comparing Features

Published on April 27, 2022 by Nicole Mara

This post is brought to you by Perfect Wiki, a tool that helps you create a database of your company resources right in Microsoft Teams. Try us out for FREE today, no sign-in or credit card required.

Sharing company knowledge through a wiki app is becoming best practice among Microsoft Teams users. However, not all third-party apps actually deliver on their promise of MS Teams integration.

So if you’re looking for an alternative wiki for your Microsoft Teams workspace that will actually make your workflow easier, read on. Here we compare our MS Teams collaboration tool, Perfect Wiki, with a well-known knowledge management SaaS, Atlassian Confluence.

If you don’t have the time to read the whole post, see the summary table at the end for a side-by-side comparison of Perfect Wiki and Confluence.

Overview and key features

Confluence

Atlassian Confluence is a remote collaboration workspace that allows members of a company to create a shared knowledge and resource base. It’s a standalone wiki that offers limited integration with Microsoft Teams.

While Confluence has a larger number of overall features, the complex installation process and its imperfect functioning within Microsoft Teams may actually hinder its promise of productivity.

Key features:

• Inline editing and comments
• Hundreds of page templates
• Intuitive and flexible space management

Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki is a knowledge management solution designed specifically for use within Microsoft Teams.

Our mission was to create a self-sufficient and intuitive knowledge management tool.

Perfect Wiki is the feature-rich replacement for the MS Teams built-in wiki you have been looking for.

Key features:

• Flexible permissions
• Rich formatting tools
• Real-time or asynchronous content collaboration

How easy is it to install?

Confluence

Honestly, the installation process was frustrating. The Atlassian landing page is not intuitive, so just getting to Confluence and creating an account took several tries.

Adding a Confluence page to a channel tab in MS Teams is pretty simple, but you and your teammates will all have to sign on separately to access the page in the tab.

Perfect Wiki

Adding Perfect Wiki to MS Teams, on the other hand, takes just a couple clicks. You and your team won’t need to go through the frustrating sign-in process Confluence asks for. Simply add Perfect Wiki to a channel and your free version is ready to go.

Does it integrate with Microsoft Teams?

Confluence

Confluence was not designed with MS Teams compatibility in mind - this was more of an add-on they released once Microsoft Teams became everyone’s go-to remote workspace. You can search for Confluence pages and send them to MS Teams chats, you can pin a specific page as a channel tab (read-only), and you can take notes in an MS Teams meeting with Confluence.

That’s it - all actual knowledge-building features can only be accessed in Confluence outside of Microsoft Teams.

You can see in the screenshot below that the only action I can perform with the pinned Confluence page is leave a comment.

Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki was designed for Microsoft Teams. Our workspace lives right inside Microsoft Teams channels, where you can freely store, share and create company resources for the whole team to refer to. We developed it when we realized that most wiki tools are not compatible with Microsoft Teams, nor are they affordable for smaller teams.

How easy is it to add members?

Confluence

Adding your Microsoft Teams members to the Confluence wiki takes work—your team does not automatically transfer from MS Teams to Confluence.

You will have to manually add your members by sending out email invitations, and your staff will have to use separate logins for each workspace.

Perfect Wiki

We at Perfect Wiki wanted to remove this productivity roadblock. You do not need to manually add members. All the members of your organization will automatically have access to Perfect Wiki.

New MS Teams members will also be automatically added to the plugin, so you can go straight to creating and sharing knowledge without having to wait for employees to join the workspace.

How easy is it to import your data?

Confluence

Confluence also seems to be buggy when it comes to import - I tried to upload a Word document from my device a few separate times, and I couldn’t. So I copied and pasted my content to a new Confluence page. It didn’t help my frustration when I saw that my image was not preserved. Well, at least the rest of the formatting is acceptable.

As far as other import options go, you can’t bulk import your content, and it doesn’t look like you can upload Web page format docs either.

Perfect Wiki

Easy as pie - we have an “Import” menu that’s visible right from your main workspace. From there, you can import documents in Word format, HTML/Text/Markdown, and you can even grab all your content from the MS Teams built-in wiki if that’s where you used to keep your content.

Can you import files from the MS Teams built-in wiki?

Confluence

Unfortunately, no, so if you already have files in the Microsoft Teams built-in wiki, you will have to manually download them from the SharePoint folder associated with the channel where the wiki is located, and then copy-and-paste each file into Confluence separately.

And there’s no guarantee Confluence will preserve your formatting, as we’ve seen above.

Perfect Wiki

If you already have content in the MS Teams built-in wiki, you’re in luck. Perfect Wiki has an import option that helps you get all your files from the built-in wiki quickly and easily. You will be taken to the SharePoint folder with your files where you can download them, and bring them into your Perfect Wiki workspace.

Learn how to get your content from the built-in wiki here.

How easy is it to export your data?

Confluence

You can export a “space” (a.k.a. a folder of pages) from Confluence in PDF, HTML, or XML format. You can also export separate pages in Word format (including all the formats above). Obviously, this can only be done from your Confluence workspace, not from Microsoft Teams.

Perfect Wiki

We made it incredibly straightforward - find the “Download” option in the ellipses menu next to a page name, and you can export any page as a PDF, Web page, or even send it directly to print.

How easy is it to find a specific page?

Confluence

Confluence has a full-text search, but it’s not typo-tolerant and it doesn’t highlight in-text results. But otherwise it serves its purpose. This is also one of the few MS Teams integrations Confluence offers - you can search for and send links to pages to your channel chat by searching for it right from MS Teams.

Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki’s full-text search goes through all the pages in every channel, giving you text snippets and spelling suggestions as you search. Bonus - it’s typo-tolerant!

Does it have a mobile version?

Confluence

Confluence does have a mobile app for those who use it as a standalone wiki, and you can open the page you pinned as a tab in the MS Teams mobile app (needless to say, only in read-only format).

Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki follows Microsoft Teams wherever it goes. That means the mobile version too! You can open Perfect Wiki in your mobile MS Teams app and continue editing and creating content right from your phone.

Can you lock the wiki content from being edited?

Confluence

Yep, in the Confluence app itself. You can change permissions for specific pages as well as whole spaces, BUT this feature is only available with paid plans. If you’re on the free version, your pages will be open to editing and deleting by anyone who has access to them.

Perfect Wiki

Absolutely. You can assign editing or read-only roles to each team member individually. Those with read-only access will not be able to change content in any way. You can also assign admin and members, the former being able to edit permissions and assign new admin.

Access the permissions menu right from the MS Teams tab in your channel in “Account and settings.”

Where is the data stored?

Confluence

Direct quote from their website:

“Today, Atlassian maintains data centers and hosts data in the US, Germany, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. We provide all customers with secure, fast and reliable services by hosting their content in multiple regions around the world.”

Perfect Wiki

All user content is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2+ with perfect forward secrecy and full GDPR compliance. Our servers are located in the US and EU (Ireland and Germany) and use full disk, industry-standard AES 256 encryption.

Customers who wish to have their data processed within the EU will have the option to specify it as their data region of choice.

What about the price and trial period?

Confluence

Confluence is free forever for up to 10 users with limited features and no user permissions. After that it’s $5.50/user a month for the Standard plan. This isn’t significant if you’re a relatively small team, but can quickly become a sizable amount once you start growing your company.

For a team of 100 users, you will be dishing out $550 a month for their most basic plan. You can get a 7-day free trial of the Standard plan, no credit card required, which is not really enough time to explore such a complex app with your team.

Get all the pricing info here.

Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki offers a forever free plan with 3 users and 25 pages per channel, no credit card or sign-in required.

Paid subscription price starts from USD 10 per month if paid annually, 14 days free trial is available.

See more pricing details here.

So What’s The Verdict?

Confluence

To sum up, Confluence definitely has a lot of useful features to offer. However, they are best used outside of Microsoft Teams. Using the two apps together might end up creating more work for you in the end. Plus, the paid Confluence plans are a serious budget consideration for small to medium companies.

If your company is already comfortably settled in Microsoft Teams, we don’t recommend making Confluence your go-to wiki.

Perfect Wiki

Instead of forcing you to constantly switch between workspaces, Perfect Wiki offers all the most powerful functions of Confluence (and more) within a collaboration space that is already familiar to you—Microsoft Teams.

What’s more, Perfect Wiki will not drain your budget—our fixed rate paid plans do not charge more or less based on company size.

So grow your company with confidence and enjoy seamless knowledge management from the comfort of Microsoft Teams with Perfect Wiki.

To simplify your decision-making process, we summarized our key findings in the table below. What are you looking for in a wiki? See the features of Confluence and Perfect wiki side by side to help you find the perfect fit for your team.