View Source

Native inline comments are available only starting from Confluence 5.7. If your instance runs on an earlier version, Confluence native inline commenting won't work.

Talk add-on and Confluence 5.7 native inline comments have some similar features in common. However, Talk’s functionality is a lot richer and more various than the one of Confluence native inline comments.

Talk’s unique features are very useful, some of them are indispensable. And we continue working on making Talk the tool that is much more powerful and flexible than native inline comments. Because as a professional using Confluence you need advanced features. And it’s our objective to provide you with them to help you be more efficient with less efforts.

We believe settling for limited functionality impairs collaboration in Confluence.

Comparison: Talk add-on vs Confluence 5.7 inline comments

Feature

Talk add-on for Confluence

Confluence 5.7 native inline comments

Notes

Creating inline comments by just pointing to the paragraph you refer to

With bigger fragments of text it’s so much easier to just point to a paragraph to comment it.Talk allows that in view mode.

With Confluence native inline comments you are supposed to highlight the whole text fragment.

Creating inline comments by selecting a text fragment

Talk doesn't support adding inline comments to the highlighted text. It has another concept.

Confluence native inline comments work by adding inline comments to a selected text fragment.

Default Space Viewing Permissions

With Talk you can set default space viewing permissions applied to all the talks created within the space.

Use it to:

have comments and discussions visible only to the members of your team on your public pages.

have comments and discussions visible only to specific users and user groups and hidden from everyone else with pages viewing permission for the current space.

create private notes by stating yourself as the only user who can view talks in this space.

Confluence 5.7 allows you to set only space permissions for creating and deleting native inline comments. This way a user has either permissions to view all the inline comments on the pages in the space (if has "creating comments" permission) or none.

Setting up permissions for specific comments

You can set up Space Permissions for inline comments for both, Talk and Confluence inline comments. But Talk is more flexible, as with Talk you can also configure individual permissions for any separate comment on your page very easily while adding or editing that comment.

It's a must-have feature when you want to hide a couple of private comments from users and groups that have Space comments viewing Permissions.

Or when you create 2 comments for 2 different groups that both have Space comments viewing Permissions; and each of the two groups is not supposed to see the comment you created for the other one.

If you want to know more about managing permissions, please, follow this link.

While with Confluence native inline comments you can set only Space Permissions for inline comments. They automatically apply to all the inline comments of the Space, not very convenient when you need different permissions for different comments in your Space

Viewing all inline comments of the page at the same time on the right-hand sidebar

With Talk inline comments are displayed in view mode on the right-hand sidebar all at once. You can expand the sidebar and go through all the comments and discussion.

Reviewing your pages and finding needed comments is very convenient with this Talk feature.

With Confluence native inline comments are displayed in view mode on the right-hand sidebar only one inline comment at a time.

Navigating to previous/next inline comments

Talk optionally displays all inline comments of the page at the same time instead and might have navigation later. Confluence 5.7 has the "navigation between inline comments" feature.

Archiving comments and restoring archived comments

With Confluence native inline comments you can delete or resolve comments, but not archive them.

While with Talk you can not only remove, but also archive your comments.

It works great in cases when you have comments you need to come back to in a week or a month. Why overload your page with them hanging there for so long, if you can take them out of your sight and restore later.

Once you archive Talk inline comment, your comment becomes marked as “archived”, it continues to exist on the page, but it is no longer shown. If you want to know more about archiving and restoring archived comments, please, follow this link.

Updating discussions in real time

With Talk if you are having a discussion with someone on the page using Talk, your discussion is being updated in real time; and you can see new comments in this discussion right away.

This feature is essential for real time discussions using inline comments.

With Confluence native inline comments you only get informed about new comments and have to click “Show me” every time, as there’s no real time refreshing of discussions.

Add inline comments in edit mode

With Talk you can add inline comments ANYWHERE on your page in edit mode.

With Confluence native inline comments you can’t add inline comments in edit mode.

Restore removed (aka deleted, resolved) comments

Partially

With Talk it’s possible to delete/resolve comments by removing or archiving them. You can restore both removed and archived comments.

If you want to know more about restoring removed comments, please, follow this link.

With Confluence native inline comments you can either delete or resolve comments. While you can restore resolved Confluence native inline comments, you can’t restore the deleted ones. If you delete them by mistake or for some reason need to get intentionally deleted comments back, you can’t so that. They are gone for good.