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Confluence vs Microsoft Teams: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this markdown code, we will outline the key differences between Confluence and Microsoft Teams. Confluence and Microsoft Teams are both collaboration tools widely used in businesses and organizations, but they have distinct features and functionalities that set them apart.
Integration with other tools: Confluence offers seamless integration with a wide range of tools such as Jira, Trello, and Slack, allowing teams to connect and work together using their preferred collaboration tools. On the other hand, Microsoft Teams provides tight integration with the Microsoft Office Suite, including apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, enabling users to edit and collaborate on documents directly within the Teams platform.
Communication and collaboration: While both Confluence and Microsoft Teams provide communication and collaboration features, they differ in their approach. Confluence focuses more on document collaboration and knowledge sharing, providing features like document management, version control, and commenting. On the other hand, Microsoft Teams emphasizes real-time communication and teamwork, offering features like instant messaging, video conferencing, and the ability to create channels for different project teams.
Personalization and customization: Confluence offers a high level of customization, allowing users to create personalized spaces, templates, and macros to tailor the platform to their specific needs. It also supports add-ons and plugins that extend its functionalities. In contrast, Microsoft Teams provides a more standardized interface with limited customization options. However, it offers a wide variety of pre-built integrations and apps from the Microsoft App Store to enhance its functionality.
Project management capabilities: Confluence is known for its robust project management capabilities, particularly when integrated with Jira. It allows teams to create project plans, track tasks, set deadlines, and generate reports. On the other hand, while Microsoft Teams offers some project management features like task assignments and deadlines, it is not as extensive as Confluence. Microsoft Teams focuses more on facilitating communication and collaboration rather than comprehensive project management.
Access control and permissions: Confluence provides flexible access control and permissions settings, allowing users to define fine-grained restrictions on who can view, edit, and share content. It also supports granular permission schemes for different spaces and pages. In contrast, Microsoft Teams offers more simplified access control and permissions. Teams can be created with different levels of access, but the options for customization and fine-grained control are limited compared to Confluence.
Target audience and use case: Confluence is primarily designed for knowledge management and documentation, making it suitable for teams that require a centralized platform for creating, organizing, and collaborating on documents and information. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is designed for team collaboration and communication, making it ideal for teams that need real-time communication, file sharing, and project collaboration.
In summary, Confluence offers extensive integration capabilities, robust project management features, and personalized customization options, focusing on document collaboration and knowledge sharing. On the other hand, Microsoft Teams emphasizes real-time communication, teamwork, and seamless integration with the Microsoft Office Suite, making it a more suitable choice for teams that require real-time collaboration and communication within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Since now Jira is offering pretty wide free plans, it can compete with asana at small teams. And they have a significant advantage especially if you're working in agile methodology. Confluence is also a big advantage, and also comes with a free plan, so it's a pretty big thing. But we had also talked about asana and used to work with it before a lot, but we chose to go with Jira, and it's pretty good for now.
As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.
Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.
- Slack
We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.
- Microsoft Teams
We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.
we were using slack
and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.
on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.
we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.
Pros of Confluence
- Wiki search power94
- WYSIWYG editor62
- Full featured, works well with embedded docs43
- Expensive licenses3
Pros of Microsoft Teams
- Work well with the rest of Office 365 work flow29
- Mobile friendly24
- Free19
- Great integrations12
- Well-thought Design12
- Channels10
- Easy setup9
- Unlimited users6
- Strong search and data archiving5
- Easy to integrate with5
- Web interface4
- Multi domain switching support4
- Same interface on multiple platforms3
- Great voice quality2
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Cons of Confluence
- Expensive license3
Cons of Microsoft Teams
- Confusing UI17
- Bad performance on init and after quite a use12
- Bad Usermanagement10
- No desktop client (only fat and slow electron app)6
- Can't see all members in a video meeting6
- Unable to Mute users5
- No Markdown Support5
- You don't really own your messages4
- MIssing public channels4
- Forced WYSIWYG4
- Stubborn, unused friendly3
- Challenging Onboarding3
- No linux support3
- Audio support problems1