Comparison: Talk and Confluence inline comments

Note: the information in this article applies to the Server and DC deployments. 

Those of you who use Confluence inline comments and have just found our Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence app may wonder what’s the difference between them. To save you time and effort, we compared these two solutions in the table below.

As you see, the list of differences is quite extensive. If we go into detail about every feature, it could overwhelm you with information. That’s why in this article we decided to focus on the Talk-specific features.

Setting up viewing permissions

Talk: You can set default space viewing permissions applied to all the Talk inline comments (hereafter talks) created within a space. It gives you the option to hide talks from certain users while letting them see the rest of the available page content.

The list of users who can add talks in the space

It allows you to have by default (for example):

• talks on your public pages visible only to your company users and hidden from external viewers
• talks hidden from some of your team members/teams, who have the View All permission for the current space
• only one user with the Talk space viewing permission to create private notes

Moreover, you can override space permissions for any specific comment on a page while adding or editing a talk. You can include certain users/groups in discussions or make personal notes.

Confluence inline comments: In Confluence, you can give user permissions only to delete or add comments (including inline comments), but there’s no way to restrict viewing of inline comments to users with the View All permission.

Adding Talk Suggestions to improve content

Talk: Along with a megaphone button on the highlight actions panel, you can notice a person with a chat bubble right next to it . It’s our Talk Suggestion feature. Sometimes your eye catches mistakes while browsing some pages in Confluence. To handle the error in the easiest way, you can suggest changes to this word.

It’s also a must-have feature for content creators and editors in your company. With Talk Suggestions, they can rapidly review content and make remarks to improve it. The author can accept these changes or reject them. Once accepted, they automatically apply to the highlighted text.

Talk Suggestions facilitate content review and make this process more user-friendly than Confluence inline comments. You can add Talk Suggestions in edit mode as well.

Confluence inline comments: It takes you a while to apply multiple changes to your page since Confluence inline comments are inaccessible in edit mode.

Making Talk Report to overview comments

Talk: When your page has a lot of comments, it’s proving difficult to browse all the comments and find the appropriate one. The difficulty may also arise when you want to find comments with high priority or the talks with your mention. The situation gets worse when a comment you are searching for is on another page or space. It may take hours to handle this job.

Talk Report allows browsing comments on any space/page without the necessity to leave the current page. It provides you with an overview of all comments where you get information about their content, author, status, date, and more.

This is how Talk Report looks on a page

To learn more about how to work with Talk Report visit the Talk Report page in the app’s documentation.

Confluence inline comments lose one more score against Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence in this regard.

Archiving comments

Talk: Why overload your page? You can take comments out of your sight for a while and restore them later.

Once you archive a talk, it disappears from the comment sidebar but continues invisibly exist on the page.

Confluence inline comments: You only have a choice to delete or resolve comments. In both options, the comments are absent on the page.

Marking favourite comments

When using native inline comments, you might fancy a place to store important comments and easily access them like Confluence tasks. With Confluence inline comments, you have to rifle through multiple spaces and pages to find the one comment you need. To make life easier, we rolled out the Favourite comments feature. It allows you to mark interesting ideas, thoughts, or high-priority inline comments and put them in one place. To see their context, you can press on a talk and automatically find yourself on the original page with it.

The view of the page with Favourite comments

How to proceed to your Favourite comments and manage them check our Favourite comments guide.

Confluence inline comments: It can be quite time-consuming to find the appropriate comment because they don’t provide similar functionality.

Prioritizing comments

It’s often the case that our users add talks as their personal notes or leave talks as tasks. By defining the priority for a talk, you can set the level of significance to it and decide what you should implement firsthand. You can choose one of three levels of priority for a comment:

• low (default)
• medium
• high

Also, Talk Priority can be helpful for a company or team leader to draw attention to the talks that need a quick response.

Confluence inline comments miss this feature.

Picking colors for a comment thread

Talk: The option to pick a color for a comment thread may come in handy in situations when different teams chat over the same document. You will find it convenient to distinguish teams, topics of discussion, or to highlight important comments with color.

Different teams decided to distinguish themselves with a color

Confluence inline comments only provide one color for all the comments on a page.

We hope that this list of the Talk features impressed you in a positive way. Indeed, our app gives you more flexibility and deals with a greater amount of use cases. But, as we said in the beginning, the listed options only partly describe the differences between Confluence inline comments and talks. If you’re curious to know more, watch the Talk video and check Talk documentation. Also, you can pass our 3-minute quiz and decide what comments you need more.

In case you have any ideas on how to make your experience better with our app, create or vote for ideas on our Talk feedback forum.

Talk: Add Suggestions on Confluence Pages

All Confluence users have a great way to document their ideas about any page or blog post with the help of page comments and inline comments. Commenting helps them contribute to each other’s content. Users can review what’s written on the page and comment any piece of text and then discuss all the details in a comment thread.

The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app brings team collaboration to a new level providing you with a better commenting experience:

• View, add and resolve comments not only in the view mode but also while editing a page
• Have private discussions on public pages with the help of the permissions feature
• Track all the comments per space in a detailed Talk report that helps you monitor resolved and open discussions
• Archive comments to get back to them or review them later

To further empower teams that work on pages together, we came up with a new handy feature for the Talk app. Please, welcome Suggestions in Confluence.

Propose changes

This useful feature helps you add suggestions to any text fragment both while editing or viewing the page content. This way you can easily help your colleagues improve the page content. This means that this feature allows you to:

• suggest changes during a review
• propose an update — to add some missing information or change what’s outdated
• inform the author that you found a typo

You just need to select the text you suggest to change, click and enter your suggestion text. The initial content will remain on the page and your suggestion will be displayed on a sidebar.

Discuss proposed changes

If you need to explain your point of view or want to check what other users think about your idea, you can easily discuss your suggestion – add a comment in your suggestion and mention people you want to include in the conversation. This will help the author understand why you think this change should be made and allow other stakeholders to chip in as well..

Moreover, you can use all the capabilities of the Talk app: set view permissions, priorities, use different colors, and build reports to track all suggestions in any space.

Accept or reject changes

When you suggest something, the owner of the page gets a notification and can decide whether to accept your ideas or not.

If a suggestion is accepted, changes apply automatically. In case a user rejects the suggestion, it disappears. However, it can still be found in the page history.

Try Talk – Inline Comment for Free

Check out the capabilities of Talk – Advanced Inline Comments and enjoy team collaboration in Confluence.

You can discuss and review the content your colleagues share with you suggesting edits on the fly. This way you can easily edit and correct any piece of text in Confluence both when editing or viewing the page content.

Talk – Advanced Inline Comments can be an alternative solution to the native inline comments in Confluence. You can check the difference between Talk and Native Inline Comments and choose the one that suits you best.

If you have any questions, feel free add your comments and suggestions to this blog post.

Try Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for free