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Ask HN: Which Wiki or internal documentation tools do you use?

• Someone1234 8y ago
  The desktop version of OneNote. We've tried to use MediaWiki and other fancy solutions (inc. O365's SharePoint/online OneNote) and desktop OneNote is the only one that stuck. We have .one files for each major topic with sections and pages within them. It is kind of a "low tech" solution, and maybe that is why it works. It gets out of the way, easy to backup, no downtime, etc. Although Microsoft keeps threatening to discontinue the desktop version of OneNote.
  • amf12 8y ago
    We use OneNote at work. I don't really like it as a Wiki tool. Its a superfast solution to get the work done, but the search sucks. Its difficult to get it organized if there is a lot of documentation. Its amazing to use as a personal notebook but not wiki.
• thetest3r 8y ago
  Had base-tier Confluence at one company. Super nice.
• gnulinux 8y ago
  For personal stuff I use org-mode of emacs. At the work, we use Quip.
• ewood 8y ago
  Boostnote (https://boostnote.io https://boostnote.io) with notes stored in the relevant repos. Its not perfect (Boostnote really only supports local files) but it does mean our shared body of knowledge is versioned to what is in our repos. If someone makes large changes they can work on documentation while they are developing the change knowing that their docs are only released when their change is merged. If Boostnote was aware of this workflow or allowed editing directly to remote repos it would be pretty much perfect.
• wozmirek 8y ago
  Confluence.
• juandazapata 8y ago
  Google Docs
• bberenberg 8y ago
  Confluence
• stunt 8y ago
  We have a few docs generated by Docsify for technical guidelines and handbooks. Github markdown files for short project specific docs. And Confluence for everything else including a few technical guidelines.
• juvoni 8y ago
  Notion (https://notion.so https://notion.so) All in one workspace, combines, trello, airtable, evernote, and docs. Great embed support and awesome for small teams and personal use. It's a modern day commonplace book.
  • aggronn 8y ago
    We just this week moved our sprints from Airtable to Notion. Seems like it will do everything we need--finally, we can have our sprints and our RFCs and other documentation in one place! I cannot recommend notion enough!
  • anant90 8y ago
    The only reason I gave up on Notion sometime last year was that it was mind-numbingly slow. Great product otherwise.
    • emerongi 8y ago
      I wouldn't say mind-numbingly slow, but it does struggle sometimes. The Android app is a bit poor as well in my opinion - gets the job done, but I've seen better ones by competitors. Despite those issues, I have fully switched over to Notion. Instead of trying to force some very specific workflow onto you, it just offers a great toolkit that you can use to manage your own work whichever way you like it. I would prefer a native app over a web app, but I guess that's just the world that we live in today.
    • L_Rahman 8y ago
      It's gotten faster and is getting faster over time. It was much, much worse a year ago which makes me believe that the team is paying attention to speed. Compared to the main competitor mentioned here - Confluence - it is blazing fast.
  • terragon 8y ago
    I loved their UI, but the incredibly horrible export to pdf or print drove me off it. I really needed pdf exports to release versioned documents.
  • 8y ago
• Joe8Bit 8y ago
  Quip. It's okay. Not blown away with it. We're toying with Notion at the moment, but we'll see if we can get critical mass behind it.
• luistrevino 8y ago
  Nuclino (https://nuclino.com https://nuclino.com). We just start to using it for the same use case you mention. And so far the best solution out there.
  • zzaner 8y ago
    Agreed, we started using it too.
• stevebmark 8y ago
  Confluence has nailed this product for engineering companies. So far I haven't seen anything that beats it. Generated doc tools like Javadoc/Yard are usually terrible and only good for very specific documentation use cases. If that's all a codebase has, it's a middle finger to developers.
• epage 8y ago
  > Some basic requirements are: - searchable - code snippets - hyperlinking I think another requirement to add is diagramming. I think wiki-style diagramming would be a big help for programmers to better communicate ideas. I've used external tools like draw.io but the overhead for editing, downloading, and uploading I feel gets in the way. Sadly, we are on confluence but don't use the draw.io plugin [1]. Built-in support for dot, uml, or even ascii diagrams [2] would be big help. [1] https://about.draw.io/integrations/confluence-integration-2/ https://about.draw.io/integrations/confluence-integration-2/ [2] e.g. https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob
  • harlanji 8y ago
    I like Dia enough, but lately InkScape is what’s up. Both use file formats that could be generated from source as part of the build, as well.
  • aasasd 8y ago
    Mermaid is a “Markdown for diagrams” that seems to use a more semantic markup instead of ASCII art: https://github.com/knsv/mermaid https://github.com/knsv/mermaid Would probably work nice as a plugin for a wiki.
    • Ninjaneered 8y ago
      I've been using Mermaid with MediaWiki and it has a lot of promise. Since Mermaid lets me generate diagrams from text and MediaWiki lets me store and modify structured data, I can have MediaWiki pass Mermaid data to generate graphs/diagrams that stay up-to-date as the wiki changes. I would like to see Mermaid be able to group sibling nodes[0] though, once I can do that, I can autocreate really nice organizational charts :) [0] https://github.com/knsv/mermaid/issues/637 https://github.com/knsv/mermaid/issues/637
  • marton78 8y ago
    The PlantUML plugin for confluence is free and works great for us.
• BenoitP 8y ago
  Redmine We have tickets, git, a wiki, and an agile board there. The integration let us do commits like: Added feature X from ticket #33, updated doc at [wikipage] The ticket and wikipage reference will be clickable in the interface.
• me551ah 8y ago
  Phriction which is a part of phabricator is an excellent tool, it supports all of that and the ability to 'watch'. 'Watching' a document is a very important feature which is required in documentation tools. API specs change all the time and developers depending on an evolving API need to check the document on a frequent basis which can be a timesink. Confluence is also a brilliant tool which supports watching and all the other features listed above, though it can be a bit pricey.
• 013a 8y ago
  Confluence. It's not bad. It's not great either. Which is pretty much the best way to describe all Atlassian products. It's unbearable on slow or spotty internet connections. It's riddled with bugs (just the other day my spacebar literally stopped working in their edit view). The formatting gets in your way more than markdown, but at least not as much as something like OneNote. But, it's powerful. Like any Atlassian product, you can script it to do basically whatever you want. You can organize your company workspaces however you'd like. You can set up tables which can automatically pull summary lines of any other page labeled with a specific label, which is great for automatically building indexes or tables of content. Overall, I haven't found anything better, and I write a lot of technical documentation for our company. For comparison's sake: - Github/Gitlab wikis are pretty bad. There's almost no advantage to using them over just storing markdown in the repository. - Which, we did for a while, and it works fine, but in its simplicity it misses some of the key features that I do like about Confluence (like those automated index pages and page comments). - We also used Dropbox Paper for a while; I really like it, but its primarily useful for, let's call them "transactional" documentation (write, get feedback, never look at again); It's not very good at being a Wiki, storing long-term long-form information. And given that Confluence can handle both pretty well, there's not a great argument for adopting a new service from an entirely different company we don't otherwise use. - We have G-Suite and thus Drive/Docs. The inability to easily write technical documentation with inline/block code makes it a non-starter. No thanks. If Drive added a markdown editor like Dropbox Paper I'd probably push to switch; the search is pretty great, its a platform we already have, and you get a full, amazing document editor for those documents where it makes sense. - I've never used Quip in a real work setting.
  • wj 8y ago
    I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option. I looked at Quip but it felt more informal than I was comfortable in particularly the lack of ability to setup teams and permissions that way.
    • xienze 8y ago
      > I just rolled out Confluence a couple of weeks ago after really struggling to find a better option. When you take into consideration price AND maturity AND feature set it's honestly hard to beat. I tried lots of open source Wikis and all of them lack significant amounts of polish and/or features. Confluence at least resembles a mature solution that mostly covers all the bases. And if you're a small (very small) business or just doing a personal/family Wiki, $10 per year for all that can't be beat.
• oneplane 8y ago
  Confluence
• hanniabu 8y ago
  Mkdocs - https://www.mkdocs.org https://www.mkdocs.org And to make it pretty we use mkdocs material - https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ There's a lot of great extensions that offer more functionality and features too - https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/extensions/admonition/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/extensions/admon... There's also extensions not listed in here that you can Google if looking for something specific
• jdlyga 8y ago
  Confluence works really well. It's easy to search through, edit, and create diagrams.
• hypertexthero 8y ago
  nvAlt 2, a fork of the original Notational Velocity, is a good option for personal use that supports MultiMarkdown: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ You can synchronize with Simplenote — https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/ — which has a mobile version so your notes are viewable on your phone. You can also use double brackets for wiki functionality to automatically create a link to another page of the same name. For example, [[this]] would create a link to a page called ’this’. Another option that is good for many people working together is Gollum, a wiki system built on top of Git. It is the basis for GitHub’s wiki pages, if I remember correctly: https://github.com/gollum/gollum https://github.com/gollum/gollum
• wim 8y ago
  We built Papyrs (https://papyrs.com https://papyrs.com) for this! (disclosure: co-founder)
• zzaner 8y ago
  Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/ https://www.nuclino.com/) It's a minimalist wiki with markdown support and real-time collaboration features. A lot faster and more lightweight than most of the old school wikis e.g. Confluence, MediaWiki, SharePoint (ugh). Also has a kanban board view for sprint planning.
  • kiejo 8y ago
    Thanks for mentioning us (I'm the CTO)! Let me know if you have more feedback or questions.
    • pouta 8y ago
      How can I contact you?
• avitzurel 8y ago
  We use confluence. It integrates with Jira and SAML so we have all of our users in there and it's really convenient to mention a ticket number or a team member and have it automatically import the details. The main point that confluence does really poorly (for me) is the lack of an external editor and the absolutely shameful support for Markdown. If I could edit the page with git like interface and an external editor (like you can do on Github), it would be absolutely amazing and would make it a killer product for us. Moving to another solution without deep integration to confluence/Jira is not possible since those are being used by product as well.
• qerim 8y ago
  [BookStack](https://www.bookstackapp.com https://www.bookstackapp.com) - Opensource, built with Laravel. Been using it for a few months and it’s been fantastic so far. Supports LDAP integration, markdown and a lot more!
• jaxn 8y ago
  Vuepress. We are tech company, everyone can learn to use Markdown and Git.
• ArmandGrillet 8y ago
  Stack Overflow for Teams works great from my experience. Having a wiki using Confluence is good for questions related to travel and processes but SO is the best for engineers due to its integration with Slack and ease of use (fast search, good formatting, tags).
• fran7118 8y ago
  I've used [Wyam](https://wyam.io/ https://wyam.io/) for some dotnet stuff and it works pretty well. Docs are written in markdown and it generates a static site with them. It can also generate api docs pages (with a search interface) from C# source files or compiled libs which was pretty cool IMHO.
• Ninjaneered 8y ago
  MediaWiki. The downside is that to get it running with a good set of extensions that optimizes it for enterprise use takes a bit of an effort. The upside is that once you do, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool that most users adopt without complaint. It hits all the OPs requests for searchable, code snippets (with syntax highlighting), and hyperlinking. When you add the ability to store and reuse structured data (Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki) it really becomes powerful. Others I've tried: - SharePoint (this is so bad it pains me to mention it) - Confluence (not bad, but lacks structured data and seems to be focused on serving smaller teams vs. an entire company) - OneNote (great for personal use, not as great for teams, especially not great at tracking multi-user changes) - EverNote (great for personal use, not as great for teams, especially not great at tracking multi-user changes) - Salesforce Knowledge (Didn't get too deep, but seemed better for help desk answer queue than internal documentation)
• thangalin 8y ago
  https://www.xwiki.org/ https://www.xwiki.org/ Using XWiki the following documentation architecture is attainable: https://i.stack.imgur.com/nEIXG.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/nEIXG.png
• DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  I installed MediaWiki for a personal project, and I love it. I've used a lot of other tools. Somehow the fact that the Wiki folks have heavily used the tool brings out all of the features you'd ever want, even if the implementation might be a bit clunky at times.
• drugme 8y ago
  I'd be curious if anyone can summarize the tradeoffs between Confluence + MediaWiki at some point. From what I've seen it seems to come down to: (1) MediaWiki is definitely more responsive (Confluence can be quite slow) and, importantly, considerably more expressive -- provide you can learn Markdown, which basically anyone can. (2) But you're essentially stuck with email-based logins which can be a dealbreaker to some organizations (MW does support OAuth in theory, but only in theory it seems -- the setup seems to be basically not supported).
  • Karunamon 8y ago
    I find that the admin side of Mediawiki is downright painful. Installing plugins requires mucking around in a config file on the server (it’s just another PHP app), and any errors in that file lead to a blank white page, rather than a useful error message. I also found scaling MW harder than Confluence, as unintuitive as that sounds. Same goes for troubleshooting speed problems.
    • drugme 8y ago
      Good to know - thanks
  • pbalau 8y ago
    I'll give it a shot, but I am the entire IT/DevOps/pe department for my company. It boils down to one thing: hosted so I don't have to do shite. Along with the fact that we use bitbucket, so peeps are already logged on, this makes me terribly happy. As for the best wiki I ever used, was the FB internal one, I think it was based on Mediawiki, but I was only an user, not the maintainer. It was integrated with pretty much everything else FB uses internally.
• chrisanthropic 8y ago
  I'll mention clubhouse.io every chance I get. It's billed as a Project Management software (and it's great at that) but it can be great for documentation because it: - provides hierarchical nesting (Milestones / Epics / Stories) - each object can have a relationship to another (related, blocks, duplicates) - each object offers a markdown text area, lists, github PR links/integration, comments, and can be moved between various stages (standard scrum stages or your own custom ones) - each object can be assigned multiple owners, requesters, and followers - each object can be tagged - search by title, tag, owner, state, etc. - each object can have files uploaded and attached This allows me to track why the work was done, how the work was done, and what work was done, while providing a nice README as a comment. Everything can be edited, or others in the team can leave their own comments. It's odd for sure, but I love it.
• nikivi 8y ago
  My entire wiki lives on GitHub (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge). I then use GitBook to publish it on the web and have fancy features like search and contents table on the side. https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz Been using this approach for over a year now and I love how seamless the workflow of updating files in Sublime Text, pushing it to GitHub and seeing it live is. At this point my entire knowledge base lives online and is referencible and I love it. The way I approach updating the wiki is in the wiki too: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow
  • unixhero 8y ago
    It's a pretty good wiki! I'm reading some of your material now :)
• matt_the_bass 8y ago
  We needed something simple and easy for non-dev/engineers to use. We’ve been using new google sites for about 6 months and have been pretty happy with it. We’re already gsuite users so it works nicely with that.
• hiroshi3110 8y ago
  https://scrapbox.io https://scrapbox.io
• unixhero 8y ago
  For my own projects, I use this wiki; it's amazing: BOOKSTACK - https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/ At work: Confluence Preferred tool for work: Google Drive / Text Writer and Spreadsheets
• h0p3 8y ago
  Tiddlywiki!
• devinjflick 8y ago
  I'm a fan of WikiJS. Though I havent personally gone through setting it up, the last two web projects I worked on used it. I found the UI intuitive and easy to use. I loved being able to updates either in a code editor or in the browser UI. https://wiki.js.org/ https://wiki.js.org/ https://github.com/Requarks/wiki https://github.com/Requarks/wiki
  • Grimm665 8y ago
    We also use WikiJS, it is great. The fact that all the articles are stored and checked into Git in the background is great for keeping track of who edits what, undoing accidental changes, and keeping the wiki content agnostic to the platform. That being said, there is room for improvement. Image handling is not great, and a lot of the components feel simplistic and could be fleshed out (permissions, indexing/search). Dead simple to set up though, especially with Docker-compose.
• MrCheese 8y ago
  I noticed here that noone seems to have mentioned using a static site generator for this. We are currently evaluating tools for this with much of the same requirements. My current idea for this is to use Hugo with https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-learn/ https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-learn/ as the theme. It has search, code snippets and such. Does anyone have experience with doing it this way?
• hidden_sheepman 8y ago
  Dokuwiki, easy to setup and works great.
• vkaku 8y ago
  I love TikiWiki for very elaborate setups. These days, I use a Git<->Markdown based hosting. I also wrote a small Flask script to serve contents from the repo. This makes it Heroku-able.
• tempotemporary 8y ago
  Sphinx doc
• kull 8y ago
  For non-technical team it is self hosted WordPress, goggle docs and google websites. For dev team google docs for project specs and documentations written as .md files on a separate doc repo.