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Confluence vs SharePoint
March 07, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
25★
Confluence provides one place for technical teams to collaborate—create, share, and discuss your ideas, files, minutes, specs, mockups, diagrams, and projects. A rich editor, deep Office and JIRA integration, and powerful plugins help teams collaboratively develop technical docs, intranets, and knowledge bases.
58★
SharePoint's multi-purpose platform allows for managing and provisioning of intranet portals, extranets and websites, document management and file management, collaboration spaces, social networking tools, enterprise search, business intelligence tooling, process/information integration, and third-party developed solutions. SharePoint can also be used as a web application development platform.
Confluence and SharePoint, at first glance, appear to be essentially the same thing: digital realms where humans attempt to store, organize and collaborate on documents before inevitably forgetting where they put them. Both allow teams to share files, control who can mess with them and integrate with a host of other software designed to make office life marginally more bearable. They also let users create sprawling, interconnected knowledge bases that start with noble intentions and end up as labyrinthine archives of outdated policies, meeting notes and half-written documentation that nobody dares to delete.
Confluence, hailing from the sunburnt shores of Australia in 2004, is the more relaxed, free-spirited sibling. It prefers to keep things simple—straightforward wikis, clean interfaces and a cozy little integration with its best mate Jira. It’s designed for knowledge management rather than hardcore enterprise file hoarding and it doesn’t bother itself too much with the terrifying complexity of corporate document workflows. If SharePoint is a vast bureaucratic empire, Confluence is a well-worn notebook filled with scribbles and sticky notes, just waiting for someone to finally update that one out-of-date process guide.
SharePoint, on the other hand, was born in 2001 under the all-seeing gaze of Microsoft and it behaves exactly as you’d expect a Microsoft product to behave—powerful, intricate and slightly ominous. It’s the kind of system that can run an entire company’s intranet, handle massive document libraries and enforce permissions so rigidly that even the CEO sometimes can’t access their own files. It integrates deeply with Microsoft 365, offering workflow automation, security compliance and customization so extensive that entire careers are built around simply making sense of it. If Confluence is a friendly co-working space, SharePoint is a high-security vault filled with carefully categorized folders, most of which still say "Final_Draft_v3_ReallyFinal.docx."
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
Confluence, hailing from the sunburnt shores of Australia in 2004, is the more relaxed, free-spirited sibling. It prefers to keep things simple—straightforward wikis, clean interfaces and a cozy little integration with its best mate Jira. It’s designed for knowledge management rather than hardcore enterprise file hoarding and it doesn’t bother itself too much with the terrifying complexity of corporate document workflows. If SharePoint is a vast bureaucratic empire, Confluence is a well-worn notebook filled with scribbles and sticky notes, just waiting for someone to finally update that one out-of-date process guide.
SharePoint, on the other hand, was born in 2001 under the all-seeing gaze of Microsoft and it behaves exactly as you’d expect a Microsoft product to behave—powerful, intricate and slightly ominous. It’s the kind of system that can run an entire company’s intranet, handle massive document libraries and enforce permissions so rigidly that even the CEO sometimes can’t access their own files. It integrates deeply with Microsoft 365, offering workflow automation, security compliance and customization so extensive that entire careers are built around simply making sense of it. If Confluence is a friendly co-working space, SharePoint is a high-security vault filled with carefully categorized folders, most of which still say "Final_Draft_v3_ReallyFinal.docx."
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
