Confluence vs Google Docs vs Nifty — Pros, Cons, & Review

We are going to talk a little about Confluence vs Google Docs vs Nifty Docs, introducing you to these power tools, and telling you what the pros and cons of each are with a detailed review. Make no mistake, all three of these apps are awesome, and by the time you finish reading this article, you will see why Nifty comes out as the clear winner.  You can Sign up here to Try Nifty For Free  today.

Focus of this Confluence vs Google Docs vs Nifty Review: Team Collaboration Capabilities

First things first, we need to set the criteria for this article — our goal is to compare Confluence to Google Docs against Nifty in terms of their team collaboration capabilities. This is crucial, as these tools are quite different from each other, even though you can use them for the same purpose.

Confluence is designed with team collaboration in mind, and its focus is to provide an environment that will let you and your team deliver the project with maximal efficiency.

Google Docs is intended to be a free-to-use Microsoft Word alternative. However, because it is so widely used and has many add-ons, Google Docs (as a part of the whole Google Suite) grew to become much more than that.

We will also tell you about Nifty, our all-in-one collaboration and workflow management platform that has built-in document collaboration capabilities. With Nifty, all of your projects, tasks, docs, and communications live in one place, and you will forget about using several apps just to get things done, but more on that a bit later.

Why Is Confluence Good?

Good Pedigree

Confluence is developed by Atlassian, a company that makes some great productivity and collaboration tools such as Trello and Jira, which makes them a giant in this field. Therefore, Confluence has a strong background, and Atlassian again delivered a great app.

More Than Just Text

What makes Confluence unique is that it is “more than just text,” but an organized home for your full project. It not only allows you to take notes but lets you organize everything in page trees, which will make finding elements and understanding the whole project a breeze. What’s more, Confluence enables you to group pages to let the entire team know where each page belongs. The entire nested page tree is located on the sidebar, easily available from anywhere.

Also, Confluence has a powerful search that lets you quickly browse through existing documents and the archive. Search lets you browse through results by date, type, and you can refine through the search results using filters.

Advanced Collaboration Options

Confluence makes team collaboration super easy. It has some excellent features such as inline commenting, saving comment/doc drafts (so you can share them with others when ready), liking comments, subscribing to doc changes, so you get notifications when something new gets added or changed, tagging team members in the comments and assigning them tasks, and more.

Templates To Speed Up The Creation

Confluence has a large collection of templates that will speed up the document creation process. Templates are ordered in categories, and you can filter through them based on the type of business you run. The template database is really extensive and is an excellent hub for ideas as you can always look through the templates and see if there’s something missing from the document you are working on.

Integrations With Other Services

Confluence works excellent with other apps from the Atlassian fleet, such as Jira and Trello, but you can use it with many other popular apps too. There are literally hundreds of integrations available in the Atlassian marketplace, and you will definitely find most of the tools you are already using there. These include Google Drive & Docs, One Drive & Office Suite, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and many more extensions designed specifically for Confluence that will expand its already rich toolbox.

Confluence — Bottom Line

Confluence is intended for teams of all sizes, and because it is designed around collaboration, it has some excellent features that you will not find in other document editing tools.

We especially like how Confluence keeps files organized and how easy it is to share and edit files with teammates, staying on top of every change. It is an excellent environment for teamwork and is easy to get into. Plus, with those handy templates, and numerous integrations, you will have no issues starting with Confluence, and it will become a part of your workflow in no time.

Confluence has a free plan, which is a great place to start and see how the tool works. However, if you have a larger team, you are likely to find the free plan limiting. It only allows up to 10 users, and you can share up to 2 GB of files in the cloud. Also, many of the more advanced features are missing, and you only get community support.

For more features and users, you will have to upgrade, and the prices vary, starting from $10 per user per month, depending on the size of your team, so it is not exactly cheap to use.

Why Is Google Docs Good?

A Part Of The Google Suite

If you already use other Google services such as Google Drive, Sheets, Google Slides, Drawings, Hangouts, Gmail, Tasks, and Keep, using Docs is an automatic choice.

As a part of the Google family, Docs work seamlessly with other apps from the Google ecosystem. And it has to be said, all of those apps are excellent. If you are already relying on Google Drive and similar services on a daily level, using Google Docs will become a natural part of your workflow without any need to readjust to new tools.

Also, because it is so widely used, Google Docs has many extensions and integrations, and pretty much any tool out there works well with Google Docs.

Biggest Advantage — Free To Use

Google Docs is free to use, and as such, it makes sense for you to try it and see how it works for your team. In fact, all other tools in the Google Suite are free, and it makes a lot of sense to try more than one, as they work in sync. It is impressive that Google allowed us to use such a powerful set of tools completely free.

Google Docs is a part of Google Drive, which means that you get 15 GB of storage even in the free plan, which is a lot. Furthermore, if you save your files in the Google Docs format (instead of Docx or other file types), they will not take up any space in the Google Drive! In other words, if you only use Google Docs files, you will have unlimited storage.

Solid Collaboration Options

Google Docs is a Microsoft Word alternative, but it is not just a text editor. First, Google Docs is cloud-based, and any changes that you or your team members make are saved instantaneously and automatically. In other words, no matter what happens, your work will be safe, even if your hardware dies.

Google Docs allows multiple team members to work on the same file at once. You, as the document creator, can choose how to you want the file shared. You can share it via links, or you can invite people to the doc by email. Also, you get to decide who can edit the file, and who can only view it.

All the changes are tracked and saved in the file history section, where you can see who was the last person to edit the document, and also what changes they made.

You can also comment on any part of the document, and you can tag people there too, which makes it convenient for you to assign them tasks.

However, that’s where the problem lies with Docs — the file is visible only to those who are invited to it. This will create a bottleneck, as not every one of your team members will have the access/link, unless you give it to them. If you run a small team, this is not going to be a big deal, but it will become a bigger problem as your organization grows.

Not Great When It Comes To Organizing Files

Unlike Confluence, Google Docs has very basic document organization tools. You can’t use advanced filtering, and there is no way to nest and group files.

Also, the “home” page of Google Docs only allows you to organize files by the owner, date modified, and by title. There are a bit more options in the Google Drive panel, but most of it is quite limited.

There is one significant advantage, though — the search function is excellent, which is to be expected from a tool from the Google family. It works incredibly fast, and it searches through the documents, too, not just by titles, which makes finding information a breeze.

Google Docs — Bottom Line

Google Docs is a great tool, and because it is entirely free to use, it makes giving it a try even easier. In fact, even if you decide against using it as your main collaboration tool, you will still find it a useful Microsoft Word alternative. For many people, Google Docs completely replaces Microsoft Word, primarily because it allows those cloud sync and collaboration capabilities for free.

As for the collaboration capabilities in particular, Google Docs can work for you if you don’t have a large team. It is straightforward to use and has decent features, plus it is used everywhere, so you won’t have issues with integrations.

But, for larger projects and bigger teams, Google Docs is probably too limiting to be the only collaboration tool, you will need something more powerful.

Why Nifty is the Better Solution

Nifty brings docs collaboration to a new level, as it has two options you can use to work with your team — Nifty’s own native Docs as well as its built in Google Docs integration.

Nifty docs lets you create and share collaborative documents natively with your team members, similarly to Confluence. But, if you are a fan of Google Docs, Nifty has built-in Google Docs integration. That way, everything you do in Nifty will sync with Google Drive and you can create Sheets and Slides right within your Nifty projects.

With Nifty, everything your team does stays in a single place, so there is no reason to constantly switch between apps and use one for communication, another for project management, and a third one for collaborating on documents. Nifty will keep things organized and all in one collaborative hub, which will tremendously speed up and simplify your workflow.

Because Nifty replaces many other apps, you will consolidate your data, your browser tabs, as well as your subscriptions to one Nifty solution. Luckily Nifty has a very generous Free Forever plan and the Starter plan is $5/user/month for a business to get started!

Conclusion

As you can see, both Confluence and Google Docs have some significant advantages. Confluence has some better team-oriented features, while Google Docs has the simplicity and familiarity of the Google Suite.

If you have the budget, Confluence is a better option for larger teams and bigger projects, while Google Docs is an automatic choice if you have a small team, or just need something to replace Microsoft Word that also has some convenient collaboration features.

While both Confluence and Google Docs are terrific tools, Nifty builds on top of both, integrating the best of their features, and giving you an all-in one package at a much more affordable price. It will save you an enormous amount of time, and give you the ultimate convenience no other tool on the market offers.

Try Nifty for free, and thanks us later! 🚀