Our company moved to Jira from Siebel by Oracle - THAT was a true nightmare and so Jira was a huge relief to us. But yes, it was on-prem and managed by a good admin.
It is impossible to find anything in Confluence. The search is useless. Anything that's not in my list of recently worked-on/viewed is basically gone forever.
I can search for strings that exactly exist in pages and it still doesn't find them, it has no way I can find to limit searches to pages I've modified, and its search result ordering is awful, partial search results crowd out full matches. I'm sure there's worse search features, but this is supposed to be decent, well-supported software. It's not some crap noname wiki, supported by one guy parttime.
Mumbles noises about a continuous-scraping system (which possibly runs overnight) and chucks everything into a 3rd-party search solution
(If there isn't that much content, now would definitely be the time to do this, so you entrench the capability and get everyone to depend on it to the extent that it must be fixed once it can't keep up. :P)
If you use Jira to track sprints, and you want to view the previous sprint, how would you expect to do it? I don't mean a sprint from 5 years ago, I mean the one from last week. Let's say you want to view stories that didn't get completed last sprint, or you just want to see what happened because you're doing a retrospective. How would you expect to go about this in a mature product for which your organization pays money?
You might say "well, there's probably a button on the current sprint that lets you go back in time to the last sprint. Like, some form of pagination. Or, maybe you can even set a date on a calendar and see the active sprint during that date. That would be cool."
According to Atlassian's support forum, there is "no way to currently do this"[1].
There’s something hidden in the sprint reports. One of the different views there let‘s you see the stories from any previous sprint. Not sure whether it reflects the state of the stories as of that sprint, though.
Confluence supported Markdown (or was it HTML? It’s been a long time.). We wrote a lot of automation that would pull comments out of code, format them that way, and load them into Confluence. Voila! Documentation that’s always synced with production code.
And then a point upgrade removed that support in favor of their own rich text format, so in an instant all our tooling died. We were not happy campers.
It wasn't a point upgrade - Confluence 4.0 got rid of markdown in favour of an "XHTML" storage format, then a layer on the editor to autocomplete markdown into the rich-text as you typed.
Personally I preferred the ability to edit pages as markdown, and we toyed with ways to allow users to edit the rich pages in markdown (i.e. a new transformer from the storage format to wiki-markup, instead of the editor format) - but it wasn't possible to not come up with a diverging solution for the transformations here (at the time, given the time we had spent on it).
Whilst we copped a lot of flack from the die-hard Confluence users when this was done, the vast majority of users liked the change. Also from a different angle, this was a really fun time at Atlassian - we had run out of space in the CornX (office at the time) so we had leased the floors above the pub next door (The Dundee Arms), and there were five of us in there, all with out machines crammed around a single table in this tiny room. Good times.
It was a death knell for us. We moved all our documentation into Git, which the devs found more convenient and usable. I think there might’ve been some survival bias: the people who kept using it after the breaking change liked it. The people who dropped it immediately because it ruined their workflows just moved on (or put it in read-only mode).
Oh completely agree regarding the survival bias - I think the over-arching plan was to make it more accessible to more than just dev teams, and it seems to have worked. "Like MS Word" was thrown around a bit.
Jira requires a person to tailor it to your org. It can be pretty good if you have people who configure it correctly and have a workflow that suits your team/org, but that's kinda the problem: making Jira be good is a full time job. Confluence is just a terrible experience overall. Terrible editing, terrible browsing, terrible search. I've used both at multiple orgs, I've seen Jira be good, I've never seen Confluence be good.
Yeah, same experience here. Confluence is just dogshit: the only positive thing I can say about it is that it's better as a wiki than using Google Drive with Docs, which can memory hole even faster if it's not set up correctly.
Terrible UX and performance so it’s extremely frustrating to use.
I’ve used JIRA in 3 companies and it was always the worst piece of software I had to interact with. Now we just use Github issues and their “Projects beta” and it’s a huge improvement. Engineer first workflow rather than optimized for creating some pseudo insightful views for useless managers
It's worse than that; even within Jira the editing contexts are completely inconsistent. And the cache behavior is apparently nondeterministic. It boggles my mind that such awful UX is tolerated in software used in so many companies. It's like Atlassian put all its eggs in the "crack the enterprise sales code" basket, met wild success, and that was all they were capable of. If my job required me to work in Confluence and Jira all day I'd change my job or my career.
This is a funny one. People usually give all the rage to Jira because it's so complex, and Trello because it's post-its. I feel like there's no good middle-ground, people are gonna hate one or the other
