Breeze vs. Confluence

This document compares Breeze features with built-in Confluence features, e.g., automation and the content manager in Confluence Premium.

Approvals

Draft content status

Confluence content statuses can be used to mark pages as drafts. However, they must be configured manually for each space if you want to customize the default values. With Breeze, the draft status can be configured in reusable workflows, which can be assigned to multiple spaces.

Request approvals on drafts

Breeze provides a way to request approvals on drafts. When an approval is requested, a group of users is notified and can approve or reject the content.

Confluence doesn’t offer any built-in approval functionality, but a limited process can be built using content statuses and automation rules. However, Breeze offers several features that cannot be replicated with automation rules, including approver selection, approval conditions, due dates, and approver comments.

Approval options

You can choose from several approval conditions, depending on your use case. Breeze currently offers the approval conditions “Everyone must approve,” “First response decides,” and “Majority must approve.”

When requesting an approval, you can also specify a due date. This date will be shown in the approval page list, which allows you to view pages that should be approved next or whose approval is overdue.

Draft and approval lists

Breeze offers dedicated lists for drafts and approvals. These lists include useful information about each page, including due dates and page owners, to give users an overview of drafts and pending approvals.

Working copies

One of the limitations of Confluence is that it can be difficult to keep drafts separate from already published content. To solve this problem, Breeze makes it easy to create working copies of your pages in a separate space and merge them with the original pages when they are ready to be updated. This feature integrates with approvals and the Confluence permission system so that you can enforce approvals before publishing page updates.

Approval presets

Breeze provides approval presets in the workflow configurations. These presets allow to pre-define the approval options, e.g., the approval type and lists of approvers, providing better control over the approval process.

Review and archiving

Identify inactive pages

Breeze offers workflows to help you identify inactive pages based on customizable conditions. Users can also flag pages and entire page trees individually if they believe those pages need to be reviewed or archived. To better communicate with admins and other users, they can leave comments explaining why pages can be archived.

The Confluence content manager can also identify outdated pages, but is less customizable than Breeze workflows. It’s also limited to space admins, which means that users without admin permission can’t use it to work on inactive pages.

Review pages regularly

You can enforce regular reviews of you pages with Breeze workflows. For example, pages can be flagged for review automatically if they haven’t been updated in a while or if a certain amount of time has passed since the last review. Breeze provides dedicated review functionality that makes it easy for reviewers to keep pages up to date.

A limited review process can also be implemented using Confluence automation rules that update the content status or labels of pages if certain conditions are met, but Confluence doesn’t offer any dedicated functionality for reviewers, reporting, and tracking of the review progress.

Bulk archive pages

Both Breeze and Confluence provide functionality for bulk archiving pages.

Review and archiving lists

Breeze offers dedicated lists for pages that need to be reviewed or archived. These lists include useful information about each page, including review duration, page owners, notified users, and archiving comments. They give both admins and reviewers an overview of the pages that need to be processed.

Page-level workflows

In some cases, it can be useful to override workflow rules for specific parts of a space. With Breeze, you can define page-level workflows without building complicated branching conditions in Confluence automation rules.

Content management

Multiple page owners

In Confluence, every page has a single page owner. However, Breeze enables you to designate multiple page owners. This allows you to share responsibility for content among users.

Page tree ownership

To reduce the effort required for setting up and maintaining page ownership, Breeze allows you to optionally assign page owners for entire page trees. This means that the owners of a page can also own all the pages nested beneath it.

Space ownership

Breeze enables you to designate space owners responsible for content in a space. These owners can be notified about pages that need to be reviewed or archived.

Exclude page trees

Depending on how your content is organized, you may want to exclude certain pages from workflows, for example, because they don’t need to be reviewed or archived. With Breeze, you can exclude individual pages or entire page trees from workflows. In the Confluence content manager, there is no option to filter out these types of pages.

CSV export

Breeze provides space- and page-level CSV exports that include details such as content statuses and page metadata. You can use these exports in your business intelligence and reporting tools for further analysis.

Notifications and reports

User notifications

Breeze creates reports in regular intervals to notify users about the pages they need to review and archive. These reports are aggregated so that users are not overwhelmed with notifications.

For example, if a user needs to review a lot of pages, they will receive a single notification. If the Confluence automation “Send email” action is used instead, one email will be sent per page, which can quickly lead to users losing track of their reviews.

Aggregated reports

The reports created by Breeze show aggregated information about each space, e.g., a content quality score and page counts for each status, and a list of all pages that need to be review or archived. Without Breeze, only space admins can view pages for each content status in the content manager.

Content quality analytics

Breeze tracks and visualizes the content quality of each space over time, which makes it easy to evaluate and improve your review process. Additionally, Breeze provides a quality overview of all spaces.