The first one is correct. Confluence will happily search PDFs uploaded to pages. Search in general is... well it's not good. Confluence very much requires that you know exactly what you're searching for and roughly where it is. Unless it's a PDF. In that case it will be the top result for 8 out of 10 searches.
That being said I still think Confluence is one of the best documentation platforms available. It's a little sad that Atlassian is discontinuing the server version (datacenter still exists). Many of their customers simply cannot legally use their hosted option. I know we have at least two customers who are absolutely screwed when they reach EOL on their on-prem installation, because they cannot afford datacenter licenses.
Oddly, to your first point, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Came from a company that used sharepoint for almost everything, that I referred to as /dev/null - if you didn't know EXACTLY what you were looking for, search was useless after you uploaded or created something. It was not uncommon for the document with matching search terms in the title, to show up on page 3 of the results.
Moved to a company that used Confluence for almost everything (there was already a fair bit of content), and search was an absolute dream. Even with terrible search terms, the page (or document) you were looking for was invariably in the first 3 results.
> It allows you to easily search everything!
The first one is correct. Confluence will happily search PDFs uploaded to pages. Search in general is... well it's not good. Confluence very much requires that you know exactly what you're searching for and roughly where it is. Unless it's a PDF. In that case it will be the top result for 8 out of 10 searches.
That being said I still think Confluence is one of the best documentation platforms available. It's a little sad that Atlassian is discontinuing the server version (datacenter still exists). Many of their customers simply cannot legally use their hosted option. I know we have at least two customers who are absolutely screwed when they reach EOL on their on-prem installation, because they cannot afford datacenter licenses.