Are you looking for an alternative to Confluence?
Could it be cheaper and easier to make Confluence work for you?
It can be tempting to reach for new tools when your current ones are letting you down. If you're shopping for alternatives to Confluence; here's another angle to consider.
Bend Confluence to your will
With automation and customisation features that have helped organisations like NASA, Samsung and Salesforce craft their perfect Confluence experiences: ScriptRunner can help you too (and save you the headache of another tool migration project!).
Instead, you can unlock the full potential of Confluence with ScriptRunner, getting a deeply customisable, highly automated and enterprise-friendly Confluence experience.
Let’s take a peek at where Confluence can go wrong for organisations like yours...
"Things are getting out of hand as we grow"
If you're growing fast, managing users, Spaces and pages (not to mention other Confluence data like labels and page versions) can get tricky, fast. It can feel like a beast that's impossible to wrangle (which is why you're hunting for a Confluence alternative) but with ScriptRunner, you get a whole host of new tricks to try.
The ScriptRunner solution
Automate tasks such as content archiving, tagging, and indexing. Use ScriptRunner to manage users and permissions, and much more.
Trigger these automations in whatever way makes sense for your needs:
- on a schedule
- in reaction a Confluence event,
- or manually as a one-off.
By keeping things well-organised and reducing clutter, the system can handle high volumes of data more effectively.
(Psst, team restructures, mergers, and acquisitions also become much easier to manage with these tricks up your sleeve!)
Trigger your ScriptRunner automations:
on a schedule
in reaction to a Confluence event
manually as a one-off
We don’t repeat manual tasks anymore. We didn’t understand this was possible until ScriptRunner. Now, we look at a task in our Atlassian stack, and if it can be automated it will be. It saves my colleagues time, and the company wins big time
Lennart v. Niebelschütz
Specialist for Automation & Collaboration Management at PAYBACK
"My colleagues can't find what they're looking for"
This problem breaks down into two distinct challenges, and the great news is that ScriptRunner can help with both.
Search
Search seems better in Confluence alternatives
The search functionality in Confluence can be… less effective than you'd hope sometimes, making it difficult for users to quickly find relevant information, especially in large datasets.
Solution: ScriptRunner comes with an advanced search function that can replace the native Confluence search experience, and it makes things so much quicker by:
- Advanced filters that aren't available otherwise
- Autocompletions that are totally contextual to the rest of the search
It's the finest-grain search, and it behaves like it's a little bit psychic, getting your teams what they were looking for in seconds.
Content management
Managing and organising large volumes of content can be cumbersome, leading to issues with content discovery, duplication, and outdated information. This is the inherent nature of large scale knowledge management, and would remain a challenge in any Confluence alternative, too. For Confluence, however, we know of a fix or six for this problem.
Solution: Automated scripts can manage content organisation, tagging, and cleanup, making it easier for users to find and manage information. You can restrict available labels, implement auto-archiving, copy entire Page Trees: whatever makes sense for your teams to keep information actionable. Custom macros also let you and your teams display additional information on any Confluence page to help users make their own choices about what's relevant for their needs.
Search seems better in Confluence alternatives
The search functionality in Confluence can be… less effective than you'd hope sometimes, making it difficult for users to quickly find relevant information, especially in large datasets.
Solution: ScriptRunner comes with an advanced search function that can replace the native Confluence search experience, and it makes things so much quicker by:
- Advanced filters that aren't available otherwise
- Autocompletions that are totally contextual to the rest of the search
It's the finest-grain search, and it behaves like it's a little bit psychic, getting your teams what they were looking for in seconds.
"Security and compliance concerns are growing"
If you're concerned about security and compliance, Atlassian are well-established as a technology partner, but, of course, the biggest vulnerabilities in any system are the humans accessing it. With the standard Confluence options, fine-grained access control can be difficult to configure and manage, potentially leading to either overly restrictive access or unintended data exposure.
The solution
Scripts can be used to implement fine-grained access controls, ensuring that users have appropriate access levels without exposing sensitive data.
Remember before, when we said that scripts can be run on any schedule you determine? You could take away higher levels of access every Monday at 2pm for anyone who isn't on a specific, pre-defined list. Want to auto-delete old users? The control is all yours.
ScriptRunner is also ISO 27001 accredited with a SOC TYPE 1 certificate.
ScriptRunner has the following:
ISO 27001 accreditation
SOC 2 Type 1 certification
TISAX certification
These organisations trust ScriptRunner
"Integrations aren't the easiest to achieve"
The limitations of APIs might be what has you reaching for alternatives to Confluence: they can sometimes restrict integration and automation across the different systems and workflows your teams are operating in. It can be challenging, often requiring custom development or third-party plugins (which are a pain to maintain and cost extra for every one that you add into the stack).
The solution
ScriptRunner can facilitate unlimited integrations with other enterprise tools through custom scripts, enabling seamless data exchange and workflow automation. Scripts can extend the functionality of Confluence’s APIs, overcoming limitations and providing more robust integration capabilities. There's also special handling built-in for important data such as keys and IDs.
"The cost of all the apps we need to make it work for us"
If you've been trying to make Confluence work for you for a while, you might have installed some other apps to bridge some of these gaps. Between licensing and maintenance time for updates, the total cost can be substantial.
The solution
Delete the other apps.
ScriptRunner's wide-ranging functionality (and the freedom that scripting gives you) dramatically reduces the need for expensive third-party plugins that each solve a little part of the puzzle.
By also automating administrative tasks and optimising system performance, ScriptRunner can help reduce the total cost of ownership thanks to some serious efficiency gains.
One of the things I really like about ScriptRunner is its focus on administration and adding macro functionality - system, space and user. As the developer/SysAdmin, I'm always needing more tools to comply with our company requirements. Not only does this plugin give you canned usable system and user functions, but it also gives you the ability to create virtually any macro you might want or need. You are only limited by your creativity.
Steve Hadfield
Atlassian Marketplace review
ScriptRunner has really given us an opportunity to customize our environment. The built in tools are very useful, and if one doesn't exist it's pretty simple to write your own. Their support is very responsive and friendly. ScriptRunner is definitely the best product line we use in our Atlassian environment.
Stuart King
Atlassian Marketplace review
Still on the fence about ditching Confluence?
Here's the kicker: the cost of transitioning away from Confluence to any of the available Confluence alternatives can be gargantuan.
You know this. You're dreading it already.
On top of the license fee for the new tool, there's the time spent refining what needs to move and migrating that over. There's the cost of training sessions for your team on how to use the new tool effectively and all the time spent getting buy-in.
Thought it was impossible to make Confluence work for you?
With the help of ScriptRunner: maybe it's not such a distant dream after all?
Chat with one of our experts or claim your free trial.
Success stories
Beyond the basics: how Agile Digital Solutions craft complex Jira automation for clients
Founder Ben shared details about how they facilitate working with complex processes and external systems inside Jira, using ScriptRunner to allow for seamless operations management.
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Smarter Server to Cloud Confluence migration
Smartmatic share how they used ScriptRunner for Confluence to ease their macro migration from Server to Cloud.
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Advanced Confluence and Jira automation in a regulated industry
When a NASDAQ-listed pharmaceutical contract research organisation sought a solution to the headache of regulatory compliance, they discovered Jira, Confluence, and the power of ScriptRunner.
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