Confluence vs OneNote
Learn more about your options and pick the best tool for your team.
Unsure whether to choose Confluence or OneNote for your team? You've come to the right place.
If you are evaluating document sharing tools, Confluence and OneNote will likely make it to your shortlist. Both tools have been on the market for over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands of loyal customers.
In this article, we will take a closer look at both Confluence and OneNote and examine their strengths and weaknesses to help you make the right decision for your company.
Confluence and OneNote compared
While both Confluence and OneNote are designed to help you create and share documents, they are fundamentally very different tools. OneNote is primarily a personal note-taking tool, and Confluence is a platform for collaborative documentation and knowledge sharing.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and depending on what you want to achieve, one of them may match your needs much better than the other. And if you're having trouble choosing between OneNote and Confluence, keep in mind that they aren't your only options. There are many other excellent tools that may turn out to be an even better fit for you.
To make the most informed decision, let's first dive deeper into what Confluence and OneNote have to offer, taking into account their strengths, limitations, notable features, pricing, and user reviews. We will also have a look at other alternatives you may want to consider.
Confluence
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $5/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.4/5
Unlike OneNote, which is primarily designed for note-taking, Atlassian Confluence is a multi-purpose collaboration platform. You can use Confluence to set up your internal wiki, create an employee handbook, manage technical documentation, collaborate on documents and meeting notes, and more.
A core strength of Confluence lies in its tight integration with the other products in the Atlassian suite, such as Jira, which allows you to synchronize your documentation, tickets, and issue management.
Confluence is best suited for large organizations and experienced software development teams.
Why you might prefer Confluence over OneNote:
Confluence seamlessly integrates with Jira, BitBucket, and other Atlassian products.
Confluence offers a wide range of features aimed at developers, making it a better fit for technical documentation.
Confluence has a more modern and easy-to-navigate interface.
Confluence can be used for more than just note-taking, but also for knowledge management, and more.
What users say about Confluence:
"Overall, Confluence is best when used in conjunction with Jira and other software. I don't think Confluence is the best tool for writers and editors, but it works great for tech teams."
Looking for more tools similar to Confluence? Check out this list of Confluence alternatives.
OneNote
Pricing: Free
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
When it comes to note-taking tools, few are as powerful as Microsoft OneNote. It's an exceptionally feature-rich app that includes everything from OCR to web clipping.
Like Confluence, OneNote is integrated with a large suite of products. You can connect it to any of the Microsoft 365 tools, including SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, DevOps, and more. If your organization is already powered by other Microsoft products, this makes it a lot easier to keep all your work in sync. For example, you can import meetings from your Microsoft Teams calendar with participant details pre-populated and start taking meeting notes right away.
OneNote is popular among a wide spectrum of users, including both students and professionals alike. It can also be used in a team, however, compared to Confluence, the collaboration features of OneNote are fairly limited.
Why you might prefer OneNote over Confluence:
OneNote is available for free.
OneNote offers a smooth handwriting experience, especially when used in combination with Microsoft Surface and its pen.
The OCR feature of OneNote allows you to extract text from images and screenshots.
OneNote is well-integrated with other products in the Microsoft 365 suite.
What users say about OneNote:
"My company started using OneNote a couple of years ago and I really like the diversity of the tool. It has many features, that all add to its value, such as tabs, directory structures, and the ability to integrate it with SharePoint and DevOps. It's also great for note-taking, and you can click on the screen and start typing anywhere, like you would on a paper notebook. However, my team has often found that the tool is complex, and we have had a hard time sifting through the organization."
Looking for more tools similar to OneNote? Check out this list of OneNote alternatives.
Other alternatives
It should be mentioned that your options are not limited to just Confluence and OneNote. There are many other great note-taking and document collaboration tools that can serve you just as well — or even better.
Both Atlassian and Microsoft represent the old generation of productivity software. Confluence and OneNote are both powerful, feature-packed tools, but they are also fairly bloated, slow, and unintuitive.
If you are looking for a more user-friendly, fast, and modern solution, consider Nuclino. Lightweight and minimal by design, Nuclino focuses on the essentials, doing away with clunky menus and rarely-used options. It offers a simpler and cleaner interface than both Confluence and OneNote, and makes it easy for anyone to get started with the tool.
Like in Confluence, Nuclino has extensive built-in collaboration features. Every document can be collaborated on in real time and every change is automatically preserved in the version history. Comments and mentions can be used to exchange feedback, and related documents can be linked together.
While Nuclino can be used exclusively for note-taking like OneNote, it's a unified collaboration tool that is capable of much more. You can use it to manage projects, onboard new employees, take meeting minutes, collaborate on documents, and more, replacing multiple other tools and bringing all your work together in one place.
Learn more about how Nuclino compares to Confluence: Nuclino vs Confluence.
Confluence vs OneNote: So which is better?
There is no objectively "best" tool when you compare Confluence and OneNote. The choice depends solely on your needs. Are you looking for a powerful yet affordable note-taking tool for your personal notes or university lectures? Then OneNote is definitely worth evaluating. Are you using Jira and looking for a documentation tool for your software development team? Confluence may be a better fit for you.
On the other hand, if you prefer something more modern and easy-to-use, consider exploring other alternatives, such as Nuclino. We hope this article has made your decision a little easier.
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