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I need a deep dive into Atlassian's Confluence product
Hello and thank you for asking Wonder! I understand that you are seeking a deep dive into the Confluence product offered by Atlassian. This product is being used by over 22,000 teams and makes up a large portion of the company's revenues. Additional details are below.
CUSTOMER DATA
According to Atlassian, their Confluence product is being used by over 22,000 teams globally. They do not mention the size of the companies using them overall, but offer pricing plans for small teams, large teams, and enterprises. Of the 61 customer stories for Confluence that they feature on their site, 8% have a company size of 1-49 people, 5% have 50-99, 21% have 100-499, 7% have 500-999, and 59% have 1000 or more. These companies include names like Hubspot, NASA, and Starz.
In addition to the companies that use Confluence, schools do, as well. The schools using this product include Cambridge, MIT, and Stanford.
Atlassian publishes their different pricing tiers on their site. For small teams, up to 10 users, the cost is $10/mo, which they donate to charity. For larger teams, these prices are:
•25 users: $100/mo
•50 users: $200/mo
•100 users: $300/mo
•500 users: $500/mo
•2000 users: $1000/mo
All of these offer a 7-day free trial. Discounts are available for those paying annually. These prices range from $100 to $10,000 per year versus the $120 to $12,000 per year it would otherwise be.
For companies that want to self-host, rather than use Confluence on the cloud, there are two plans, server and data center. The server plan is a one-time cost, while the data center one is ongoing, with updates and maintenance. For the server plan, the user numbers ranges from up to 10 users to 10,000+, with one-time payments that range from $10 to $28,000. The $10 plan is like the one for the cloud service. The next step up is 25 users at $1400. The data center one ranges from up to 500 users to 40,000+. The pricing for this ranges from $12,000 to $200,000 per year.
WHY COMPANIES USE CONFLUENCE
White Lion, a web and mobile development company that uses Confluence, discusses their reasons for choosing the product. They found it very effective to use for "client collaboration, document management, project development, internal communication and cross-functional knowledge sharing". Before using Confluence, they had to use a variety of different products and solutions to cover the areas that Confluence does on its own. The products have been very helpful in organizing their client information, which then allows them to share that information with clients, without giving them access to everything else. They also use it for internal documentation and team collaboration. White Lion considers Confluence to be a foundational solution that has helped their overall organization. They wrote about seeing all of these benefits just 6 months into using it.
Atlassian offers free classroom and academic licenses for many of their products, including Confluence. Siebert Media states that universities are using it because of the many different add-on options available (600+) and how easy it is to use in comparison to other collaboration software. By this group of customers, Confluence is being used as a learning management system, customer service tool, electronic lab notebook, and collaboration solution, among other uses.
FEATURES
Atlassian speaks of the many different features that Confluence offers, but highlights some over others. These include:
•Contextual feedback - this allows in-line feedback for easy organization, rather than tracking e-mail or other threads to find individual pieces of feedback
•Templates - these help a company to get started quickly without messing a lot with formatting, as well as the ability to create their own templates
•File collaboration - it works with many different file types, allows the previously mentioned feedback, and also keeps track of different versions
•Add-ons - Atlassian offers many different add-on options that companies can use to bring even more functionality to the product
•Unlimited spaces, including private ones - this allows a company to be very organized in their data, with control over who sees what
•Easy editing - unlike other tools, users do not need to understand markup language to make edits
CASE STUDIES
•Hubspot's team was growing rapidly and wanted to be able keep their commitment to transparency and collaboration. Confluence was able to take care of this and Hubspot doesn't know how they ever lived without it before. For the most part, they use it as a knowledge management system.
•Orbitz was using a solution that was not able to scale very well with their company and was slow overall, resulting in delays for coding adjustments. They began to use a number of products from Atlassian, Confluence included. They use Confluence specifically as a part of their overall software development process.
•Kabbage's growth led to the company using a number of different tools, but they did not have anything to keep everything in one place. They began to use Confluence as a "knowledge base and foundation for team collaboration", posting key company information on it. They also use it with their outside partners, to increase productivity between them.
IMPORTANCE TO OVERALL BUSINESS & GROWTH PROSPECTS
Confluence is very important to Atlassian's overall business, as it is their 2nd largest product overall. In their 2016 Annual Report, they state that Confluence, along with one other product, have made up around two-thirds of their revenues over the past 3 years. They expect this to be a continuing trend and state that market acceptance is vital to growth of these products, but that most of the factors are out of their control. The company continues to innovate new features and functionality for Confluence and expect sales from those efforts. Atlassian talks about how they have a large opportunity for growth, due to the fact that their product can be used in so many different industries. Their current focus is on the "Fortune 500,000" companies.
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Overall, Confluence is a very important product to Atlassian's overall business. This product is one of the major revenue sources and is used by over 22,000 different teams. Growth is expected for this product, but some factors are out of their control.
Thank you for asking Wonder! Please let us know if we can help you with anything else!