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I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to a

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from an editing, organizing, and also an API standpoint. It's much nicer than MediaWiki or Sharepoint for this purpose, and though it's not ideal for collaboration on MS documents, it's still very solid for working on shared documentation. - Bamboo is a decent build system. It's lagging behind Jenkins in terms of integrations and support for source-controlled declarative build stuff, but for teams that like to point and click it works well, and the support for parallel builds, branch builds, etc. is all much easier than it is in Jenkins. - Bitbucket is a reasonable choice for on-prem Git hosting. I prefer GHE, but if you have the rest of the Atlassian apps, there are some integrations that are nice, and it's not terribly expensive, so if you have ops familiar with running Atlassian apps it may be a good choice for you. That's about it. Not something I love, but definitely not something I hate. Their support is also quite good, and guided me through a painful upgrade of a stack that my predecessors had left neglected for five years with no patching. Can't complain about that!

gizmo385 8y ago
> Confluence is a top tier wiki Can you explain why you feel this way? I've felt nothing but frustration using Confluence internally. It seems to continually get in the way and have an obtuse and unintuitive way of doing things.
- alexbecker 8y ago
  Navigation in particular is nearly impossible for me.
forty 8y ago
I'm in a company which uses the full atlassian suite (on premise) and I find your comment is a very good summary. I always see people complaining about jira on the internet, but in real life, everyone I know seems happy with it, I have no idea where that come from. Maybe it depends on your admin and/or the size/culture of the company
- spiegro 8y ago
  Whenever someone passionately hates Jira my go-to line is "your Jira instance can only be as good as its admin." IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins. So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.
alienreborn 8y ago
Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use whatever editor they want to. This repo is now filled with quality documentation for most of our stack and operations.
- nwatson 8y ago
  I'm an engineer and love Confluence + Gliffy. Writing fully interlinked documentation with illustrations and tables and styling is much easier than with any other tool.
  - my_usernam3 8y ago
    I'll second the love for Confluence as an engineer. Easy to use and navigate imo. Hate JIRA with a passion though, at least the two implementations I've use have been exhausting with fields and options.
- nl 8y ago
  I'm an engineer and I like Confluence, especially compared to any other options. And doubly compared to markdown (although I concede I'm probably the only engineer who dislikes markdown)
- wting 8y ago
  How do non-engineers update documentation?
- sumedh 8y ago
  > Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. How exactly is it Confluence's fault if your team does not update the docs?
  - spudlyo 8y ago
Macha 8y ago
> (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.
bitofhope 8y ago
While we're sharing opinions, my take on these. - Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer. - Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful. - No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.

gizmo385 8y ago

> Confluence is a top tier wiki Can you explain why you feel this way? I've felt nothing but frustration using Confluence internally. It seems to continually get in the way and have an obtuse and unintuitive way of doing things.

alexbecker 8y ago
Navigation in particular is nearly impossible for me.

forty 8y ago

I'm in a company which uses the full atlassian suite (on premise) and I find your comment is a very good summary. I always see people complaining about jira on the internet, but in real life, everyone I know seems happy with it, I have no idea where that come from. Maybe it depends on your admin and/or the size/culture of the company

spiegro 8y ago
Whenever someone passionately hates Jira my go-to line is "your Jira instance can only be as good as its admin." IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins. So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.

alienreborn 8y ago

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use whatever editor they want to. This repo is now filled with quality documentation for most of our stack and operations.

nwatson 8y ago
I'm an engineer and love Confluence + Gliffy. Writing fully interlinked documentation with illustrations and tables and styling is much easier than with any other tool.
- my_usernam3 8y ago
  I'll second the love for Confluence as an engineer. Easy to use and navigate imo. Hate JIRA with a passion though, at least the two implementations I've use have been exhausting with fields and options.
nl 8y ago
I'm an engineer and I like Confluence, especially compared to any other options. And doubly compared to markdown (although I concede I'm probably the only engineer who dislikes markdown)
wting 8y ago
How do non-engineers update documentation?
sumedh 8y ago
> Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. How exactly is it Confluence's fault if your team does not update the docs?
- spudlyo 8y ago

Macha 8y ago

> (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.

bitofhope 8y ago

While we're sharing opinions, my take on these. - Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer. - Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful. - No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.