When to use Confluence or Jira

Almost every company I’ve worked at has provided access to both Confluence and Jira. These two tools offer a ton of functionality and features that can help make our lives easier, but many times I find myself asking myself “which one should I use?”.

On the surface this should be an easy question - after all Confluence is a knowledge base and Jira is for ticketing. This distinction, however, can easily break down - Confluence supports task tracking and can be used to manage work, and Jira can easily be used to house information about things in the form of task descriptions, fields and more.

So let’s take a deeper look at these two systems, their differences, and why we may choose one of the other in some cases.

Confluence

Confluence is intended to serve as a collaborative platform for sharing, maintaining and creating information. It excels at allowing individuals to work on content together, manage and store that information and easily add more as it is created or discovered. Personally I find myself using it mainly to keep track of what I’ve been up to in the form of meeting notes, product updates and other notes.

Part of collaborating, however, includes tracking tasks or action items. For example, during a meeting I may record that Bob will update the server on Friday, or that Sally will connect with Procurement about an important contract. To support this, Confluence allows us to track tasks, which can have assignees, descriptions and due dates… which sound awfully similar to a Jira ticket.

Jira

Jira is intended to help teams manage work in the form of tickets. Tickets can have different types, for example bug, task, story, etc. Each type of ticket can also follow its own workflow, so tasks can have a different set of steps necessary for completion than bugs. Additionally tickets can have any number of data fields attached to them allowing teams to collect and track many kinds of metrics relative to their work.

Part of managing work, however, includes collecting information about what you’re doing. For example an HR team may build out policies using Jira tickets and include information about them in the description field. An engineering team may collect API documentation on a ticket as well… both of which sound awfully similar to a Confluence page.

How to choose

Given the number of similarities the systems share (tracking an item of work, collecting information, etc) it can sometimes be hard to know which one to use. For example, I could keep Jira open during meetings and add new tickets as action items are identified. I could also open up Confluence any time I learn something new about a task and add it to a page.

My general rule is to use whichever one requires the least amount of work. Typically this results in me using Confluence as it makes managing information easier, and also supports tasks. Only when I get to a point where Confluence tasks don’t support what I need (e.g. adding more information to a task, requiring a workflow or approval, etc) will I switch to Jira.

Fortunately both systems are tightly integrated, allowing Jira tickets to be posted directly on Confluence pages and Confluence pages to be easily linked to Jira tickets. This makes it very easy to span both systems when I need to.