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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 has another concept, thus it doesn't support adding inline comments to the highlighted text.

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

Setting up default Space comments viewing permissions

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

Use it, for example, to have by default:

comments and discussions on your public pages visible only to the users of your company and hidden from external viewers.

comments and discussions visible to specific team members (teams); and hidden from the rest of the employees who have pages viewing permission for the current space.

only one user with Talk viewing permissions in this space (to create private notes).

Confluence 5.7 allows you to set space permissions for creating and deleting (not viewing) comments; and for viewing All or nothing. This way you can't hide single inline comments or all of them from the users with "view All" permission. As users either have the permission to view the pages with all the inline comments (if they have "view All" permission) or they can't view pages (together with pages' inline comments) at all.

Setting up permissions for specific comments

With Talk you can very easily configure individual permissions for any separate comment on your page while adding or editing that comment.

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

While with Confluence 5.7 you can't do it for separate native inline comments. Since page's viewing is either restricted together with all of its content or a user can view a page with all of its content (including all of the inline comments). Not very convenient when you need different permissions for different comments on your page.

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

Partially

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 workbox notifications 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.