Chris Woodill who writes a Diary of an IT Innovator created a comparison matrix that I found enlightening. Since he’s personally implemented both technologies it was interesting to see the differences between the two technologies side by side. Personally and in my experience, at its core Sharepoint is more of a document management system with bolt on applications that make the entire system difficult to use and not seamless. Confluence is very good Wiki that’s easy to use and deploy.

Chris’s pricing model for Sharepoint seems low in my experience, but that depends on many factors we can’t cover here. A good tool I have used in the past is the Bamboo Sharepoint calculator which in my opinion gives a far more accurate picture of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The Wiki in Sharepoint is terrible and should be replaced with tools like MindTouch 2009, Social Text or even Confluence. I disagree with Chris’s assessment here. The Sharepoint Wiki is weak and does not have a lot of functionality.

Chris writes, “Comparing the two products is a bit of an apples to orange comparison because the markets for each are quite different. Confluence is primarily a collaboration tool for small to medium size enterprises. SharePoint is an enterprise portal that includes collaboration but also dozens of other portal features.” I couldn’t agree more here, but must emphasize that Sharepoint is more analogous to an enterprise platform for a variety of use cases where Confluence is a specific point application for Wiki collaboration.

Bottom line, Sharepoint is extremely difficult to set up and use at the enterprise level. They have traction because they are Microsoft and have a very impressive partner channel. Confluence is a very easy to use tool and is a valuable collaboration tool. Use Confluence for your Wiki, Sharepoint for enterprise document management (if you have a large IT staff) and MindTouch for Collaborative Networking.