Remember when you first saw Confluence? Clean interface, decent editor, that WYSIWYG promise that actually worked. Perfect for your scrappy 10-person startup. Six months later, you hit 50 users and suddenly pages take 15 seconds to load. A year in, search returns "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError" more often than actual results.
Your Bill Doubled Overnight (And Nobody Knows Why)
First thing that pisses everyone off: Confluence pricing makes no sense once you hit 20+ people. Started free for 10 users, seemed reasonable. But here's the 2025 reality - Standard plan is $5.16/user/month, Premium is around $11.55/user/month for small teams. So that "simple" 20-person team? You're looking at $231/month just to start, then $462/month if you need any premium features.
And get this - prices are going up again February 2025 for Data Center customers. Meanwhile, Notion charges $160/month for the same 20 people on Plus, or $360/month for Business features. Turns out you hit some storage limit nobody knew existed (250GB for Standard), needed "premium" features that should've been included, and those marketplace apps? They add up fast. The billing dashboard throws CONFLUENCE.BILLING.STORAGE_EXCEEDED errors but doesn't tell you where the fuck the storage is being used.
The licensing is intentionally confusing. "User tiers," "storage overages," marketplace add-on costs - it's designed to extract more money once you're locked in. Classic enterprise software bullshit.
The Editor is a Nightmare
Confluence's editor is straight garbage. Simple formatting takes forever, tables are impossible to edit without wanting to throw your laptop, and don't get me started on trying to paste from Word. Half the time it corrupts your formatting and you have to start over.
The table editor is particularly fucked. Want to add a column? Good luck. Try to merge cells? Hope you've got 10 minutes to spare. Meanwhile Notion's editor just works, Slite is clean and fast, and Nuclino doesn't fight you on every edit.
And those macros? Half of them break randomly with CONFLUENCE.MACRO.ERROR.UNKNOWN, the other half slow down your page loads to 20+ seconds. You spend more time fixing formatting than writing content. Version 7.19.1 completely broke the Include Page macro and took them 3 months to fix. The Table Filter macro throws JavaScript errors in Chrome 118+, and don't get me started on the Jira Issues macro timing out every time your Jira instance has more than 1000 issues.
And don't get me started on navigation. Try finding a page in a 500+ page Confluence instance. Search takes 30 seconds, returns irrelevant results, and the page hierarchy becomes this nested mess nobody understands. New team members spend their first week just trying to find basic documents.
Performance Goes to Shit After 6 Months
Here's the fun part: Confluence works fine until you actually start using it. Got 1000+ pages? Search becomes slower than dial-up. Pages take 10+ seconds to load, especially with images or attachments. Database queries over 10ms? You're fucked, and their docs admit it.
They finally added OpenSearch in 2024 claiming it's "4.5x faster", but guess what? It's only for Data Center customers, and it still breaks randomly. We had a 3000-page knowledge base that became unusable. Searching for anything took 30 seconds minimum, pages crashed browsers, and the whole thing would go down for maintenance every week. SentinelOne agent conflicts now cause additional loading issues because of course they do.
Look: If you're a global team, forget about it. European colleagues complained daily about 15-second load times. Asian team members gave up and started using Google Docs instead.
Integrations Only Work if You Live in Atlassian Land
Sure, Confluence plays nice with Jira and Bitbucket - if you want to be locked into the entire Atlassian ecosystem forever. But try connecting it to Slack properly, Microsoft Teams, or any modern tool your team actually uses? Good fucking luck.
The API is clunky, integrations break constantly, and forget about connecting to your CI/CD pipeline or design tools like Figma or Miro. Everything requires third-party middleware that costs extra and breaks randomly.
Your Team Started Using Google Docs Behind Your Back
First it was just the designers making mockups in Figma and sharing Google Docs. Then engineering started keeping their own notes in Notion. Marketing never even learned Confluence - they live in Airtable and Slack threads.
Your "unified knowledge base" became the place where outdated policies go to die. Meanwhile, actual work happens in whatever tools don't crash when you copy-paste code blocks.
I've watched three different companies try to "get everyone back on Confluence." Know what happened? The productive people kept using their shadow tools, and the company paid for both systems while getting none of the collaboration benefits.
Bottom line: Migration sucks, takes 3x longer than planned, and costs way more than budgeted. But staying on Confluence when it's actively making your team less productive is worse. Pick your poison, plan for 6 months minimum, and budget for therapy.
Way more than you budgeted. Here's what actually happens: