You’re looking for plugins to support document management and compliance in Confluence, and you’ve found two that look interesting.
The first is the AppFox Confluence approval plugin (an Atlassian Marketplace app, also known as Approvals for Confluence). You’ve also discovered a Confluence workflow plugin, again created by AppFox, and known as the Workflows for Confluence marketplace app.
They both look like useful tools – but they also appear to be quite similar. How do you know which is right for you?
Well, given that we made both of these Confluence plugins, we can tell you. We’ll also help you understand which is right for your use case, and how you can maximize value from it.
Let’s go.
What is the difference between the AppFox Confluence Approval plugin, and the Confluence Workflow plugin?
Both plugins are Atlassian Marketplace apps, and both are designed to help manage your document lifecycle.
The Approvals for Confluence plugin is primarily for straightforward content review and approval processes. You can use Workflows for Confluence, meanwhile, to manage a broader, more complex document lifecycle.
This means that the Confluence Workflow plugin is often well-suited for organisations in highly regulated industries, or those with stricter compliance requirements.
Let’s compare the two Confluence plugins side by side.
How do the features of the Confluence Approval vs Workflows plugins compare?
As you can see, the Approvals for Confluence plugin is not as feature-rich as Workflows for Confluence. Think of it as a ‘lite’ version.
This does mean that it’s ideal for organizations who are starting out with their document management journey, and may want a tool to easily implement single-stage approval processes and workflows.
Let’s explore some use cases.
Confluence Approval plugin use cases
- You haven’t used a third-party plugin or Atlassian Marketplace app yet, and have been relying on Confluence’s native features to manually manage approvals. So, you need a user-friendly Confluence approval solution that you can get started using quickly and easily.
- You need to embed a straightforward approval chain (e.g. one approver who can review a document in a single step). Despite its simplicity, you can use Approvals across multiple teams and products, by building simple workflows for each. So you could create an approval process for finance documents, HR policies, marketing content, and so on.
- You have lots of content in review, and need to understand instantly the status of each page. The Approvals for Confluence plugin provides Approval search functionality, so you can find pages and quickly see at a glance whether they’ve been approved yet or not.
- You have a document which contains different sections requiring different sign-offs. Let’s say you have a proposal document, covering various service areas of your business. A stakeholder from each of these teams needs to sign off on their relevant section. You can use the ‘Section Approvals’ feature to apply approval workflows to different sections of your Confluence pages.
‘Excellent app for maintaining documentation integrity. It enables us to implement a publishing gate, ensuring SMEs or content owners validate critical information before it reaches the wider organization.’
How does the Workflows for Confluence plugin compare to the Approvals plugin?
We mentioned that the Workflows for Confluence app can handle more complex document management needs than our Confluence Approval tool.
In fact, Workflows is often (although not exclusively) used by organizations in regulated industries, as it supports robust auditing, quality control, and visibility across the entire document lifecycle.
Confluence Workflow plugin use cases
- You want to manage and automate every stage of your end-to-end document lifecycle. Workflows for Confluence enables you to build bespoke workflows that handle your approval and publishing processes, alongside page permissions and versioning controls.
- You need multiple stakeholders to review and approve content. With the Workflows plugin, you can build multi-stage approvals, ensuring that each document always passes through the appropriate check-points before publishing.
- You want to scale your document approvals in line with each business area. Marketing content might only need a single-stage approval, whereas Financial documents may need three separate stakeholders to review. You can use the Workflows for Confluence app to create unique processes for each team or use case.
- You need to build out a centralized document management process, with visibility across every stage. With the AppFox Confluence Workflow plugin, you have sight of all user changes, feedback and more with full workflow histories, and track workflow steps and statuses.
- You need a way to manage page expiration dates. To manage multiple documents with different expiry policies, you can build bespoke workflows to manage page updates, expiry notifications, and archiving across all your different business areas.
- You require a clear audit log of all activity across all documents and workflows for compliance and reporting purposes.
‘AppFox Workflows for Confluence is an essential tool for our clinical research company, particularly in managing SOP approvals and validation documentation. Its intuitive features streamline these critical processes, ensuring efficiency and compliance. The Approval History feature is invaluable for maintaining transparency and accountability in document reviews. The ability to publish released versions across different spaces allows us to work effectively within drafts.’
How can I start using the Confluence Approval or Workflow plugin?
The great news is that you can try both our Approvals and Workflows Marketplace apps for free, for a 30-day trial!
This gives your teams the opportunity to try out each plugin and understand how they can support your use cases.
You’ll also be able to gauge whether Approvals for Confluence is the right fit for your needs, or whether you’d benefit from the more robust compliance and quality control features provided by Workflows for Confluence.
Try both for free today over on the AppFox Atlassian Marketplace!
