BRD Template Comparison: Word, Google Docs, Confluence & Ash

You have a project kicking off and you need to produce a Business Requirements Document. You have already decided on a BRD rather than a lighter format, and now you are staring at a choice between platforms and templates. Word, Google Docs, Confluence, a purpose-built tool like Ash. They all look serviceable until you are two weeks in and realise the format is working against you rather than for you.

I have written BRDs on all of these platforms across government, utilities, and enterprise environments. The platform choice matters more than most people admit. It affects how stakeholders engage with the document, how review cycles run, and whether the artefact holds its structure once multiple people have had a go at it. Here is how the main options compare, and how to pick the one that actually fits your project.

What You Are Actually Choosing Between

A BRD template is not just a blank document with headings. At minimum it should prompt you to cover background, scope, stakeholders, business requirements, non-functional requirements, assumptions, and constraints. The platform you use determines how that structure survives contact with a real project team. Some platforms preserve structure well. Others let it collapse the moment someone starts editing.

If you are still building your understanding of what a BRD needs to contain before you evaluate formats, the BRD example on this site is a useful reference point. And if you are trying to understand where a BRD sits relative to other requirement documents, the comparison of BRD versus FRD will help you confirm you are using the right document type in the first place.

Side-by-Side Comparison

When Word Is Still the Right Call

Word gets dismissed as old-fashioned, but on regulated or high-formality projects it remains the most practical choice. Government departments, utilities, and infrastructure organisations often require a BRD to be signed off with a wet or digital signature, version-controlled against a document register, and stored in a records management system. Word integrates with all of that natively.

The risk with Word is structure drift. Once a template is emailed around, someone will rearrange headings, delete sections they think are unnecessary, or paste in content that destroys the formatting. If you are using Word on a multi-stakeholder project, lock the document structure before you distribute it and use tracked changes consistently. A free download of a properly structured Word BRD template is available on this site if you want a starting point that already has the right sections in place.

When Google Docs Works Well

Google Docs excels at speed and accessibility. If you are working on a project where stakeholders are spread across organisations and you need comments and review cycles to happen quickly, Google Docs removes the friction of file attachments and version confusion. Everyone is always looking at the same document.

The problem is structural fragility. Google Docs has no equivalent of a protected template. Anyone with edit access can delete a heading, reformat a table, or insert paragraphs in the wrong section. I have seen well-structured BRDs turned into meandering narrative documents after a single round of stakeholder input. If you are using Google Docs, maintain a master copy you control and use suggestion mode rather than direct editing for stakeholder review. The Google Docs BRD template on this site is set up with this workflow in mind.

When Confluence Makes Sense

Confluence works well when the project team is already living inside Atlassian tools and requirements need to be linked to Jira stories or epics. The inline commenting and page hierarchy features make it genuinely useful for iterative requirement refinement. If your project is running sprints and the BRD is a living document that gets updated regularly, Confluence handles that workflow better than Word or Google Docs.

The friction point is access. Confluence requires every stakeholder reviewer to have a licence and an account. On projects that involve external contractors, government counterparts, or senior executives who are not on your Atlassian instance, this creates a barrier. I have managed this by exporting a PDF snapshot at each major review milestone and circulating that, while keeping the live document in Confluence for the working team. It is an extra step, but it keeps the source of truth clean.

When an AI-Assisted Tool Changes the Equation

Purpose-built AI tools for BRD writing, like Ash, take a different approach. Rather than giving you a blank template to fill in, they guide you through the document section by section using prompts and questions, then generate a structured first draft. The output is consistent because the structure is enforced by the tool itself rather than by the discipline of whoever is editing the document.

This is particularly useful when you are under time pressure on the early analytical work, when you are new enough to BRDs that you are not confident you are covering everything, or when you need to produce multiple BRDs across concurrent workstreams. The output still needs your professional judgement applied to it, but starting from a shaped draft is faster than starting from a blank template.

Worked Example: Project X, Organisation B (Utilities Sector)

I worked on an infrastructure refresh project for Organisation B, a state utilities provider. The project required a BRD for a secure file transfer system upgrade. The team was internal IT, with reviewers spanning network, security, continuity, and the solution architect. The product owner was also the primary subject matter expert.

We started in Word, which was the organisation’s document standard. The BRD went through nine draft versions before it reached final status, with reviewers assigned specific sections rather than the full document. That worked reasonably well until the security lead and the IT continuity lead sent back conflicting edits to the non-functional requirements section in the same version. Both had edited the same table, one in tracked changes and one without. Reconciling those edits took half a day and delayed the sign-off cycle by three days.

In hindsight, Confluence or Google Docs with suggestion mode would have prevented that specific problem. But the organisation’s records management requirements meant the final signed version had to be a Word document stored on the project server, so the platform was effectively fixed by policy. The lesson I took from it was to be explicit up front about who owns each section and to lock the document between review rounds rather than leaving it open for editing.

The BRD itself covered fourteen functional business requirements and over thirty non-functional requirements across security, performance, availability, maintainability, and SaaS categories. At that level of complexity, the template structure carried a lot of weight. Any platform that lets structure collapse under stakeholder editing would have made that project significantly harder.

Matching Template Format to Project Type

• Regulated or formal approval projects: Word remains the most appropriate choice because it integrates with document registers, supports formal sign-off, and produces artefacts that satisfy audit requirements.
• Small agile or startup projects with distributed teams: Google Docs works well when speed, accessibility, and low friction matter more than structural control, provided you manage the edit discipline carefully.
• Integrated delivery teams on Jira: Confluence is the natural choice when requirements need to link to stories and the working team already has access, but you need a separate strategy for external stakeholder review.
• Time-pressured or complex multi-section BRDs: An AI-assisted tool like Ash provides a consistent structural scaffold and a shaped first draft that you then refine, which is faster than building from a blank template at scale.
• Hybrid projects with formal sign-off and active iteration: Start in Confluence or Google Docs for the collaborative drafting phase, then migrate the approved content into a Word document for the final signed artefact.

The Structural Requirements That Any Template Must Meet

Regardless of platform, a BRD template needs to enforce certain structural non-negotiables. Missing any of these sections consistently leads to rework downstream when developers, testers, or architects ask questions that should have been answered in the document.

• Executive summary or background: Stakeholders who were not in the room during elicitation need enough context to understand why the project exists before they evaluate the requirements.
• Scope inclusions and exclusions: The exclusions matter as much as the inclusions. Explicitly stating what is out of scope prevents scope creep conversations later.
• Stakeholder register or RACI: The BRD from Project X included a full reviewer table showing who was responsible for which sections and by which date. That level of specificity made chasing sign-offs much more manageable.
• Prioritised requirements with a clear scheme: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, or MoSCoW equivalents. Unprioritised requirements force delivery teams to make priority calls that should have been made during analysis.
• Non-functional requirements as a separate section: Security, performance, availability, maintainability, and compliance requirements regularly get absorbed into functional requirements or omitted entirely when templates do not force the separation.
• Assumptions, constraints, and dependencies: These are the conditions that the requirements are written under. If the assumptions change, the requirements may need to change too.

The platform you choose for your BRD template is a real decision with real consequences for how your project runs, not a preference. Word gives you formality and auditability. Google Docs gives you speed and accessibility. Confluence gives you integration with your delivery toolchain. Ash gives you structural consistency and a faster first draft. None of them is universally correct, and the one that served you well on a six-person agile project may actively obstruct you on a thirty-stakeholder regulated programme. Match the format to the project context, not to habit, and your BRD will do the job it is supposed to do.