Choosing a platform for your internal IT documentation is a high-stakes decision. Get it right, and you have a single source of truth that streamlines support and empowers your team. Get it wrong, and you end up with a digital ghost town—a messy, outdated repository that no one trusts or uses.
Two of the biggest names in this space are Atlassian’s Confluence and Microsoft’s SharePoint. Many companies already have one of them as part of a larger software suite, making them a default choice. But are they the right choice for a dedicated IT knowledge base?
This honest comparison will break down the pros and cons of each platform specifically for IT teams, helping you decide which is the better fit—and revealing the critical piece both platforms are missing.
What is Confluence? The Collaborative Wiki
Confluence is a wiki-style collaboration tool. It’s designed to be a central place where teams can create, share, and discuss their work. It excels at project documentation, meeting notes, and building interconnected pages of information.
Pros of Confluence for IT Documentation:
- Excellent Editor & Templates: The Confluence editor is intuitive and powerful. It’s easy to create beautiful, well-structured pages with tables, layouts, and macros. It also comes with useful templates, including ones for troubleshooting articles and how-to guides.
- Strong Integration with Jira: If your team lives in Jira for ticketing, Confluence’s native integration is a massive advantage. You can link tickets to knowledge base articles, create new articles from tickets, and surface relevant documentation directly within the Jira Service Management agent view.
- Powerful Search: Confluence has a robust search function that indexes everything, including page content and attachments, making it relatively easy to find information if you know what you’re looking for.
- Collaboration-Focused: Features like inline comments, page history, and @mentions make it easy for the entire IT team to collaborate on creating and updating documentation.
Cons of Confluence for IT Documentation:
- Can Become a “Digital Junkyard”: Its greatest strength—flexibility—is also its greatest weakness. Without strict governance, Confluence spaces can quickly become disorganized and filled with outdated, conflicting information. This erodes trust, a death knell for any knowledge base.
- Not Purpose-Built for Q&A: Confluence is designed for long-form, collaborative documents, not necessarily for quick, simple question-and-answer articles that helpdesks need.
- Requires Active Maintenance: It is not a “set it and forget it” tool. It requires a dedicated “gardener” or administrator to keep the content organized, updated, and archived.
What is SharePoint? The Document Management Powerhouse
SharePoint is Microsoft’s web-based collaborative platform. While it can do many things, its core strength lies in document management and storage. As part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, it’s a natural starting point for companies heavily invested in Microsoft products.
Pros of SharePoint for IT Documentation:
- Deep Microsoft 365 Integration: SharePoint seamlessly integrates with Teams, Word, Excel, and the entire Microsoft ecosystem. You can surface SharePoint pages in Teams channels, co-author documents, and leverage Microsoft’s search capabilities across all apps.
- Granular Permissions: SharePoint offers incredibly detailed permission controls. You can lock down access to specific sites, libraries, folders, and even individual documents, which is crucial for sensitive IT information.
- Version Control: Its robust versioning system is a major plus for IT teams, allowing you to track changes to SOPs and runbooks and easily revert to previous versions if needed.
- Often “Free”: If your company has a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license, you might already have SharePoint, making it an attractive option with no additional software cost.
Cons of SharePoint for IT Documentation:
- Clunky User Experience: The user interface for creating and organizing content can feel dated and less intuitive than modern wiki tools like Confluence. It often requires more clicks to get where you need to go.
- High Administrative Overhead: Setting up and managing a SharePoint site effectively requires specialized knowledge. It’s not as simple as just starting to type.
- Search Can Be Hit-or-Miss: While Microsoft Search is powerful, configuring it to surface the right information at the right time from within a sea of documents can be challenging.
The Verdict: Which One is Better?
- Choose Confluence if: Your team is deeply embedded in the Atlassian ecosystem (especially Jira) and you need a platform built for active, real-time collaboration on documentation.
- Choose SharePoint if: Your organization is a dedicated Microsoft shop and your primary need is for structured document management with granular security controls.
The Critical Piece Both Platforms Are Missing
Here’s the honest truth: both Confluence and SharePoint are just empty containers. They provide the structure, but they do nothing to solve the most time-consuming part of running a knowledge base: writing and maintaining the actual content.
Your team still has to spend hundreds of hours writing guides for common software like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, and Zoom. And the moment that software updates its interface, your guides become obsolete. This is why most knowledge bases fail.
Instead of just choosing a container, what if you could have a knowledge base that came pre-filled with a library of expert-written, automatically updated guides?
That’s the power of a managed knowledge base. It handles the generic, time-consuming documentation for you, freeing up your IT team to focus on creating guides for your unique, internal systems—the very documents you can use our 10 Free IT Documentation Templates to create.
Ready to stop writing guides and start solving problems?
See how Kandbe’s library of pre-written, automatically updated guides can save your IT team hundreds of hours, no matter which platform you use.