5 Key Differences Between SharePoint & Confluence

As more and more business workflows move to the cloud, enterprises implement collaboration software to improve business efficiency. Popular collaboration tools like SharePoint and Confluence empower business teams to communicate, share information, and manage projects together seamlessly and intuitively.

However, choosing the right software for your business has a great impact on the success of your teams. In this article, we will compare different features and benefits of SharePoint and Confluence to help you select the right one for your team.

SharePoint vs Confluence

Content Collaboration & Organization:
In order to get the work done, teams must be able to overcome the challenges while collaborating effectively. To do this, they require a technology that enables them to add, edit, update and share documents and information irrespective of their location barriers. Both SharePoint and Confluence are cloud-enabled and offer anytime, anywhere access to information. But Confluence edges ahead when it comes to active content collaboration. It is an ideal tool for documentation which constantly grows and evolves. It allows users to collaborate in real-time and offers access to previous content versions, making it easier to view changes and revert back if required. SharePoint, on the contrary, is relatively static. It is geared towards document management. It provides more complex controls and permissions, which is imperative to enterprises with complicated security levels.

Features & Functionality:

Going Mobile:
Microsoft and Atlassian made their respective collaboration tools available for iOS users in June 2016. The apps for Android and Windows Phone users will be released in near future. However, Confluence takes the first mover advantage by enabling early access sign up to its users for the Confluence Android app.

Enterprise Scale Cloud User Limit:
Microsoft provides enterprise organizations with a choice between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online on the cloud. Although Atlassian offers a choice between Confluence hosted on your server or on the cloud, it comes with limitations. It restricts the server version of Confluence for enterprises having more than 10,000 users. In addition to that, pricing for both tools varies depending on your requirements, with the prime factor being the number of users.

Integrations & Add-ons:
Both SharePoint and Confluence offers strong integration with tools from third-party vendors. Confluence closely integrates with Jira, HipChat, and a number of other development tools while SharePoint integrates with Microsoft Office 365 offerings. Interestingly, both the tools integrate with a wide range of plugins and add-ons for extended functionality. This enables teams to customize their experiences to suit specific requirements. SharePoint and Confluence also include thousands of add-ons that are paid and free. All these add-ons, plugins and tools are offered by external vendors and independent developers alike. At the time of SharePoint custom application development, Microsoft offers more than 1,000 free and paid add-ons while Atlassian offers nearly 700 add-ons for Confluence.

Final Thoughts:
Confluence offers great usability and intuitive design. While SharePoint makes collaboration easier and quicker through seamless document sharing and management. However, the decision of choosing the right software ultimately boils down to your specific business needs. You can evaluate the needs of your teams and decide on one that fits your requirements the best. In case you’ve already begun evaluating your requirements, do let us know in the comments which one is the best fit for your organization?