When comparing Confluence vs MediaWiki, the Slant community recommends MediaWiki for most people. In the question“What are the best multi-user wikis?” MediaWiki is ranked 2nd while Confluence is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose MediaWiki is:
Mediawiki is a widely used wiki engine. It is used to power Wikipedia and thus most people will be more comfortable/accustomed to using MediaWiki.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use
Confluence offers a highly intuitive and user friendly experience without sacrificing the advanced feature set of a typical wiki.
Pro Integrates well with other services
Confluence integrates well with other Atlassian offerings like Jira, a bug tracking system.
Pro Keyboard shortcuts support
There are a lot of shortcuts to speed up the interactions with the editor, viewscreen, workbox, etc.
Pro Hierarchical page tree
Most wikis don't have a page hierarchy, but Confluence has one, and this is very helpful for a lot of people.
Pro Great plugin ecosystem
Confluence offers a huge selection of paid and free plugins across all kinds of different categories that extend the functionality of the core software.
Pro Document and inline commenting offers low-commitment opportunities to contribute
Often someone that is not an expert/owner of a process is hesitant to edit documentation of someone that is. The ability to merely comment on the existing material helps elicit improvements without requiring as much boldness.
Pro LDAP integration
Confluence provides built-in connectors for:
- Microsoft Active Directory
- Apache Directory Server (ApacheDS)
- Apple Open Directory
- Fedora Directory Server
- Novell eDirectory
- OpenDS
- OpenLDAP
- OpenLDAP Using Posix Schema
- Posix Schema for LDAP
- Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE)
- A generic LDAP directory server
Pro The de facto standard
Mediawiki is a widely used wiki engine. It is used to power Wikipedia and thus most people will be more comfortable/accustomed to using MediaWiki.
Pro It has a powerful templating system
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under GPL.
Pro Version control
MediaWiki allows viewing past revisions of pages.
Pro It has a usable WYSIWYG editor
Pro Thanks to Wikipedia it is thoroughly documented
Pro Runs on any PHP server
It requires a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later of any kind.
Pro Great multilingual support
MediaWiki has full support for over 65 languages and partial support for over 300.
Pro Multiple database support
MediaWiki can store data in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite databases.
Cons
Con Pretty slow
The hosted version feels slow and can be annoying to use regularly.
Con Search is utterly terrible
It requires having to put in almost exactly what's needed to get a result on the front page. Defeats the purpose of the problem it's supposedly solving.
Con Many unresolved bugs
Atlassian is notorious for not resolving bugs for months or even years in Confluence.
Con Costs money
Although inexpensive, starting at $10/mo for 10 users, many other solutions are free.
Con WSIWYG editor is broken
Markup is not saved and complicated to use.
Not suitable for dev teams.
Con Redesigns are rolled out without thorough testing
There were two major redesigns for Confluence (cloud version) in the last couple of years, and both of them were released in a very immature state, causing a lot of trouble for existing clients.
Con No full Unicode support (no real emoji support)
Confluence has a limited number of "emoticons" but doesn't support emojis as defined in Unicode.
Con Access control requires an extension
There is no built-in access control, but you can download an extension for ACL.