4 posts tagged with "comparison"

Architecture decision records are great, and you should write them. But ADR tooling shares one assumption: that a decision lives in one file and stays there. If your real decisions live across Slack, GitHub, Jira and Confluence and keep changing, you'll eventually want something that fits that reality. Here are the alternatives and how they compare.

If you haven't picked an ADR tool yet, start with ADR tools compared; this piece is about what comes after.

If you're an Atlassian shop, Confluence is probably already your system of record, and you've likely got a decision-log or ADR space in there. This compares how Confluence holds up for engineering decisions versus a decision graph like Align, and why the two work well together.

Plenty of teams start their decision log as a Notion database. It's a reasonable first move, and for a small team it can be enough. This is an honest look at where a Notion decision log works, where it breaks, and when a decision graph like Align is the better fit.

There's no dominant tool for architecture decision records, which is a useful signal in itself: the field is young and most teams are still figuring out what they actually need. This is an honest comparison of the real options, what each is good at, and the problem none of them solve.

If you're new to ADRs, start with the complete guide and come back here when you're picking tooling.