Confession takes three broad forms, and they do different work.
Private confession is the Catholic and Orthodox practice: the penitent names particular sins to a priest, receives counsel and a penance, and is absolved. Catholic practice requires it for grave sin before receiving communion, and at minimum once a year. The physical arrangement is designed to keep the priest a witness rather than an audience, a screened box in the Latin tradition, and in Orthodox practice standing beside the priest facing an icon rather than facing him, so that both are turned toward the same thing.
Communal confession names wrongdoing collectively and without individuating it. Jewish liturgy on the Day of Atonement recites an alphabetical catalogue of transgressions in the first person plural, so that the entire congregation confesses everything on the list, including what most of them have not done. That is deliberate. It asserts collective responsibility and it removes any possibility of looking around the room to see who is confessing what. Protestant liturgies commonly include a general confession of the same shape.
Monastic confession is disciplinary rather than sacramental. The Buddhist monastic community assembles twice a month, at new and full moon, to recite the code of training rules, and monks are expected to have disclosed any breach beforehand; the recitation moves through the categories of offence with a pause after each for anyone to declare. This is among the oldest continuous institutional practices in any religion, and its purpose is the integrity of the community rather than the forgiveness of the individual, a genuinely different aim, and one worth not assimilating to the Christian model.