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Comment by cryptos | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" is only half the price. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions

It's only "half the price" if you ignore the cost of Confluence itself. The Atlassian people are also historically awful at building out features that make hosting their products easier (for example, they've ignored a request for a "read only" mode for about 12 years now [1]).

The simple fact that it is a product that is made by someone other than Atlassian is a huge selling point.

[1] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-6390?page=com.a...

FYI that we're implementing read-ony mode in our data center product line, and we've also got various knowledge base articles for how to achieve this should you need it:

  https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-make-confluence-read-only-311920317.html

In any software, you've always got old requests that haven't been filled. We're just public about it.

StackOverflow has the same issue here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feature-requ...

Many top requests are 9+ years old.

I have never had the opportunity to tell anyone at Atlassian how much I love Confluence. There are so many cool technical feats that improve my experience, like being able to open an embedded spreadsheet in Excel and having it update the version on the page when you hit save. So many things that aren't natural for the web are seamless, like indent levels and accepting pasted images. So many organizational tools like excerpts and child view macro. So many usability features like attachment versioning and keyboard shortcuts.

It takes a great company to make such a great product so easy to use. Thank you.

"Questions for Confluence" surely benefits from its synergy with other Atlassian products, but it's not clear to what extent. Auto-linking of Jira tickets numbers?

Unfortunately for folks like me down in the trenches, the manager types typically have more sway when it comes to picking products like this. Expanding the Atlassian license to include one more product probably sounds much easier to them.

However, the $1.65 per user difference in price is likely not going to be a deal breaker for these decision makers if it can be shown that StackOverflow, the clear dominant player in Q&A, has a superior product.

I've never used teams, but speaking as a user of questions, half the price and third the usability.

I'd rather not learn a 9th Atlassian specific markup language.

I find JIRA and Confluence to be uncomfortably slow, even on high end hardware. I recall SO took a "scale up" approach but hopefully they can do better.

I 100% agree on the speed here. I thought it was just my inability to self host Atlassian products. I tried Atlassian OnDemand and the performance was actually worse compared to self hosting.

I legitimately don’t know if I’m just bad a “tuning” their stuff, but JIRA and Confluence in particular were nothing short of miserable to use daily. Bamboo was great, but it had a lot less daily interaction than JIRA, for obvious reasons.

We have recently replatformed Jira and Confluence in Cloud: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/atlassians-two-year-cloud-...

I'd encourage you to take a look again.

I've used Questions for Confluence before. I've noticed that from the "supply side" (someone writing documentation), it's not better than writing a Confluence article. From the "demand side" (someone having a question), it doesn't beat the immediacy of Slack. So while I'm glad to have the option to have team SO, I'm not sure it solves the documentation problem better than other tools.

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