JIRA Admin VS Confluence Admin

[Ricky Lin]

I know the answer could be very subjective, but wanted to get an opinion form the community on which administration is "harder" or "easier" based on your experience and/or the certification exam. 

I consider myself to be a rather prolific JIRA Admin (certified as of Dec/2017) but never had much experience in administering an enterprise Confluence instance (I've only messed around with it on Cloud).  Has anyone had a good amount of experience using both suites and could offer an opinion on this topic? :)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

They are very different beasts, but the admin for Confluence is definitely easier.  There are fewer things to configure in a Confluence system, and it has fewer odd quirks.

I found writing the Confluence Admin exam questions harder than writing the Jira ones, because there was less to work with and less to question! 

[Ricky Lin]

I can always count on the Nic for some insightful feedback!

I relate to Confluence like how I've managed SharePoint before and wondered if it was fair for me to say "Since I'm good at administering JIRA, Confluence shouldn't be too hard to pick up!"

May I ask when you took the Confluence Admin exam, though?  The JIRA exam questions were definitely challenging for me and it's on my roadmap to attack the Confluence one next (with just the Atlassian Confluence Prep course and maybe a Confluence sandbox, probably).  From the sound of your response, it's almost as if you need to try to write up exam questions for Confluence!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you've been an admin on Jira, you should find some bits of admin on Confluence are the same, and some more bits are very similar.  It will help you pick it up.

I never took either exam.  I was part of the team that wrote the first Jira Admin and Confluence Admin exams.  So I'd not only seen all the questions and answers, I'd peer-reviewed them, and written about 1/6th of them myself.  Not much point in putting me through the exam...

[Ricky Lin]

Thank you for always being helpful man :)  Good insight o hear to for sure - I'll make it my own goal to tackle this next year!