Why should you listen to me on this subject? I have been working in the knowledge management industry since 2003 and have talked with many people who are thrilled with or frustrated with both Confluence and ScreenSteps, so I can point out what people love and hate about each platform. Now, please be aware that I work for ScreenSteps, but I am going to do my best to give you an honest comparison of the two platforms for the specific purpose of training and supporting your employees. If your use case is different, then this article may not be that useful to you. My ultimate goal is to help you make the right decision on a knowledge management and training platform for your business.
Confluence is an enterprise grade wiki. Wiki's can be used for many, many things. The whole promise behind a wiki is that anyone can share knowledge with others on their team. In addition, you can edit each other’s content to clarify or improve it. Confluence primarily focuses on this use case - collaborative knowledge management.
ScreenSteps is a knowledge base and training platform that is primarily designed to help you standardize and communicate your procedures so that everyone in your organization knows exactly what to do in a given scenario.
So, while both will allow you to capture and share knowledge, Confluence focuses on collaboration while ScreenSteps focuses on standardization and clarity. You can certainly collaborate in ScreenSteps and you can create clear and standardized content in Confluence, but those aren't the primary drivers in each product.
Confluence has three versions:
They have a great pricing tool here that will let you figure out exactly how much Confluence will cost. But basically, it comes down to $5/user/month for the Standard plan or $10/user/month for the Premium plan. They offer monthly and yearly plans and discount the average per user cost as you choose a higher number of users.
ScreenSteps has 3 plans:
ScreenSteps also bills based on the number of monthly active users. You will need to get a quote based on plan and number of users you need, but plans start at $1,800/year for up to 30 users with per user costs between $5 and $10/user/month for the Standard and Advanced plans. ScreenSteps also offers monthly plans and volume discounts.
Cost-wise, the two platforms are pretty comparable.
Like I said at the beginning, I am mainly going to be focusing on the employee training and performance support use case with both platforms. For other use cases, there may be a different list of pros and cons. I'm going to look at the whole lifecycle of content on the platform:
Confluence
Confluence includes a web editor that allows you to add a variety of resources to a page or article. This page on their site details the options. They include:
They also support advanced dynamic content through the use of Macros. Confluence says that these Macros are similar to Excel macros or Google widgets. Macros can help you do many things, including adding dynamic content to a page.
It will also allow you to use templates for different types of pages (How-to, Project planning, etc.).
The authoring experience will be very similar online with a few exceptions:
ScreenSteps
ScreenSteps allows you to create Articles instead of pages. All articles are part of chapters. All chapters belong in a manual. Your table of contents is automatically generated for you as you create content.
In ScreenSteps, The authoring experience is very different from a standard web editor. In a ScreenSteps article, everything is a "block" that will show up in an outline in the editor sidebar. Block types include:
Block editing helps you create clearly organized documents when you are writing out procedural documents. The outline format also makes it very fast to update or reorganize a procedure.
ScreenSteps also includes a desktop authoring tool for Windows and Mac which includes an integrated screen capture and annotation tool. This means you don't have to use a separate graphics utility in order to add images to your procedures. The ScreenSteps desktop tool makes authoring and updating how-to guides with screenshots extremely fast.
Similar to Confluence you can add a table of contents to an article, though the process is a bit more manual (see details here).
ScreenSteps supports a feature called Foldable sections which is similar to Confluence's Expand macro.
ScreenSteps also supports various text block styles such as alerts, info, warnings, speaker prompts, etc. to help you call out important information.
One of the big differences between ScreenSteps and Confluence are interactive checklists and workflow articles. Interactive checklists allow you to create a list of checklist items. Each checklist item can be expanded to show more detailed instructions. This allows you to create simple checklists for experienced users, while allowing novice users to expand each item for more detailed instructions.
Workflow articles allow you to ask users questions and then guide them based on their answers. These workflow articles are ideal for troubleshooting guides as well as Interactive Conversation Flows that can be used to guide contact center agents through any call.
Both platforms support versioning but Confluence will do a better job of showing you the difference between each document version.
Confluence will allow you to export your content to Word, PDF, HTML, or XML.
ScreenSteps will allow you to export to PDF. You can use the ScreenSteps API if you need to export content as HTML. ScreenSteps does not export Word files.
Rolling out a training and knowledge base platform can be a big deal. Both platforms allow for self-service options. If you need assistance in implementing Confluence, there are many consulting companies that offer Confluence implementation services.
ScreenSteps offers customized onboarding services as well. During that process we help you:
Now that you understand the similarities and differences between each platform, here is how we would suggest you evaluate each platform:
Hopefully, this article has been helpful. If you would like to learn more about ScreenSteps, go ahead and schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial.