6 ms·

Any suggestions on what to use instead of Confluence? Need to run on-prem, it's mostly the wiki-like features I'm interested in.

winkelwagen 5y ago
What target group? Devs? Po? General org?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I'll just go with "Yes" because we use the same Confluence installation our entire organisation. Spaces might be configured differently, but we can have all our documentation in one system and link across space. There really isn't that many alternatives, SharePoint maybe, but then you're just suggestion something worse.
nix23 5y ago
I migrated every confluence instance over to XWiki, since the Australian backdoor law[1]. http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome https://xwiki.com/en/try-xwiki/ https://xwiki.com/en/try-xwiki/ [1] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-impact/ https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...
skinkestek 5y ago
> Need to run on-prem, it's mostly the wiki-like features I'm interested in. Since you are looking mostly for the wiki part there is Dokuwiki which is magnitudes better at being a wiki. Remember, wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick or something to that effect and whatever Confluence is it isn't quick. Don't know how well it will hold up under scrutiny if black hats gets a reason to swarm over it, but unlike Confluence you can hire someone to patch the guts of it if necessary. Edit: I have no reason to believe it is worse than anything else, I'm just pointing out it probably hasn't had so much exposure to help it harden.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  The downvotes make no sense to me. Maybe mentioning the value of open source, as you did, is disliked? Dunno. Weird.
- philpem 5y ago
  I get the sense that there are a few Atlassian employees on HN this morning... Jira and Confluence are "okay" at what they do, but they're horribly inefficient. I wonder how much energy would be saved if all the JIRA and Confluence server farms were replaced with single servers or redundant setups running something more efficient. Atlassian seems to be one of the subjects of the 2000's versions of the old line: "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Anyway the discussion in this thread is interesting to me - just to hear about the alternatives.
- detaro 5y ago
  For a non-technical user group you likely want something more WYSIWYG than Dokuwiki.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Maybe. But I have a hunch that we are severely underestimating huge parts of the workforce. I mean: ux discussions often feels like they assume users are a separate species somewhere between ordinary humans and chimps when it comes to intelligence. I have some experience with training users and I have only given up once.
    - detaro 5y ago
      I fully agree that you can train users for a lot. But the question is if it's worth doing so in the specific case. And wikis often already have trouble with people not using them enough, making them seemingly hard to use doesn't help.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Don't forget that in many ways some real wikis like Dokuwiki are simpler and more user-friendly than Confluence: - you can edit a paragraph without locking or creating conflicts for the whole page - it is much faster, and as far as I can see the observe–orient–decide–act loop is a real thing and should be taken into account - much better wiki syntax (compared to old Confluence) - trivially extensible so you can create forms and other helpers to make it simpler for users to do the right thing - if one absolutely need it I think there exist at least one wysiwyg extension for Dokuwiki
polote 5y ago
Biased but I'm actually building a competitor (V1 is almost ready) to Confluence for medium to big organizations. But I don't understand your requirement for on-prem. That's clearly not an advantage from the security point of view. Apart from Quip, Sharepoint and Confluence (soon stopped) I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem. The only thing that you can hope for, is "bring your bucket" in which static resources can be uploaded in your S3/Google/Azure bucket and some managed instance (like Atlassion Cloud) for the app. But on prem is going to be something from the past honestly
- nix23 5y ago
  >I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem. XWiki?
  - polote 5y ago
    I personally do not categorize them to equivalent to Confluence, Sharepoint, Notion, Quip, ... but if you do, yeah there are few wiki software which are available on premise.
    - nix23 5y ago
      What can confluence do what XWiki cannot? But i understand that you try to promote your cloud offering ;)
      - polote 5y ago
        I'm not trying to promote my cloud offering. I would like to be able to offer self hosting, but we still haven't found a way to do it. This is too much hassle for everyone. There is a tradeoff between ease of use of a software and the security process. A collaboration tool which is difficult to update and thus will not evolve quickly is an issue for its adoption and for its benefits. Well first its interface, if a non technical user can't user the tool that's going to be a big problem. Confluence has not the best interface but still better than Xwiki. The best the interface the better the adoption as a whole in the company. And for knowledge sharing adoption is critical. That's actually why Notion has been such a success recently. Even though their product is average, people want to use it, because they like the interface. I don't have the time to do a full comparaison of other features, but wiki tools are in usage very different than collaboration tools. Can you have the list of last consulted documents ? Can you embed external documents ? ... Kind of the same things as Slack vs IRC
unixhero 5y ago
I am considering going with Bookstack Wiki for my company. But I am not a Fortune500 company. I would say it is very darn complete, perhaps without the syntactic linking that Confluence has. The only thing missing from it, is a very solid backup and restore method from the admin panel. The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem".
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem". Just a note on this, this is something I'd like to build in eventually. It's just that each layer of our own we add upon the underlying methods increase the risk of error in something fairly critical. A simple command-line based backup solution wouldn't be too difficult to add, but restore and admin-panel usage are more significant challenges once you get into it.
js4ever 5y ago
You can try Wiki.js or bookstack, both are open source and nice
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Thanks for suggesting BookStack [1]. I did initially create the project as a free open-source alternative to confluence as I didn't want financial approval being a limiter to documentation collaboration. One of the main things to consider with BookStack is the semi-fixed Shelf > Book > Chapter > Page structure (Where pages have content, chapters & shelves are optional, and Books can be within multiple shelves). For some this structure is limiting, For others it helps drive organization. [1]: https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/
plasma 5y ago
You could put Cloudflare Access (with Tunnel) in front to shield against exposing the instance directly, I’ve used it in the past for other products that has been good.
mch82 5y ago
Mediawiki has worked well. I’d be curious to hear others experiences with it. VisualEditor is an extremely good WYSIWYG interface. The wiki is able to scale well (project sites are unlikely to approach Wikipedia scale). The API is useful. Wikitext editing gives power users a lot of flexibility, though it’s not as popular as Markdown. Access control & edit-publish workflow options may be too limited for the desires of some project teams.
neovive 5y ago
My company is currently migrating off of Confluence due to the ending of the on-premise license. We found a combination of a simple web-based knowledgebase app for public content and Office 365/Teams -- which we already license.

winkelwagen 5y ago

What target group? Devs? Po? General org?

mrweasel 5y ago
I'll just go with "Yes" because we use the same Confluence installation our entire organisation. Spaces might be configured differently, but we can have all our documentation in one system and link across space. There really isn't that many alternatives, SharePoint maybe, but then you're just suggestion something worse.

nix23 5y ago

I migrated every confluence instance over to XWiki, since the Australian backdoor law[1]. http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome https://xwiki.com/en/try-xwiki/ https://xwiki.com/en/try-xwiki/ [1] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-impact/ https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

skinkestek 5y ago

> Need to run on-prem, it's mostly the wiki-like features I'm interested in. Since you are looking mostly for the wiki part there is Dokuwiki which is magnitudes better at being a wiki. Remember, wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick or something to that effect and whatever Confluence is it isn't quick. Don't know how well it will hold up under scrutiny if black hats gets a reason to swarm over it, but unlike Confluence you can hire someone to patch the guts of it if necessary. Edit: I have no reason to believe it is worse than anything else, I'm just pointing out it probably hasn't had so much exposure to help it harden.

bbarnett 5y ago
The downvotes make no sense to me. Maybe mentioning the value of open source, as you did, is disliked? Dunno. Weird.
philpem 5y ago
I get the sense that there are a few Atlassian employees on HN this morning... Jira and Confluence are "okay" at what they do, but they're horribly inefficient. I wonder how much energy would be saved if all the JIRA and Confluence server farms were replaced with single servers or redundant setups running something more efficient. Atlassian seems to be one of the subjects of the 2000's versions of the old line: "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Anyway the discussion in this thread is interesting to me - just to hear about the alternatives.
detaro 5y ago
For a non-technical user group you likely want something more WYSIWYG than Dokuwiki.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Maybe. But I have a hunch that we are severely underestimating huge parts of the workforce. I mean: ux discussions often feels like they assume users are a separate species somewhere between ordinary humans and chimps when it comes to intelligence. I have some experience with training users and I have only given up once.
  - detaro 5y ago
    I fully agree that you can train users for a lot. But the question is if it's worth doing so in the specific case. And wikis often already have trouble with people not using them enough, making them seemingly hard to use doesn't help.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Don't forget that in many ways some real wikis like Dokuwiki are simpler and more user-friendly than Confluence: - you can edit a paragraph without locking or creating conflicts for the whole page - it is much faster, and as far as I can see the observe–orient–decide–act loop is a real thing and should be taken into account - much better wiki syntax (compared to old Confluence) - trivially extensible so you can create forms and other helpers to make it simpler for users to do the right thing - if one absolutely need it I think there exist at least one wysiwyg extension for Dokuwiki

polote 5y ago

Biased but I'm actually building a competitor (V1 is almost ready) to Confluence for medium to big organizations. But I don't understand your requirement for on-prem. That's clearly not an advantage from the security point of view. Apart from Quip, Sharepoint and Confluence (soon stopped) I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem. The only thing that you can hope for, is "bring your bucket" in which static resources can be uploaded in your S3/Google/Azure bucket and some managed instance (like Atlassion Cloud) for the app. But on prem is going to be something from the past honestly

nix23 5y ago
>I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem. XWiki?
- polote 5y ago
  I personally do not categorize them to equivalent to Confluence, Sharepoint, Notion, Quip, ... but if you do, yeah there are few wiki software which are available on premise.
  - nix23 5y ago
    What can confluence do what XWiki cannot? But i understand that you try to promote your cloud offering ;)
    - polote 5y ago
      I'm not trying to promote my cloud offering. I would like to be able to offer self hosting, but we still haven't found a way to do it. This is too much hassle for everyone. There is a tradeoff between ease of use of a software and the security process. A collaboration tool which is difficult to update and thus will not evolve quickly is an issue for its adoption and for its benefits. Well first its interface, if a non technical user can't user the tool that's going to be a big problem. Confluence has not the best interface but still better than Xwiki. The best the interface the better the adoption as a whole in the company. And for knowledge sharing adoption is critical. That's actually why Notion has been such a success recently. Even though their product is average, people want to use it, because they like the interface. I don't have the time to do a full comparaison of other features, but wiki tools are in usage very different than collaboration tools. Can you have the list of last consulted documents ? Can you embed external documents ? ... Kind of the same things as Slack vs IRC

unixhero 5y ago

I am considering going with Bookstack Wiki for my company. But I am not a Fortune500 company. I would say it is very darn complete, perhaps without the syntactic linking that Confluence has. The only thing missing from it, is a very solid backup and restore method from the admin panel. The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem".

ssddanbrown 5y ago
> The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem". Just a note on this, this is something I'd like to build in eventually. It's just that each layer of our own we add upon the underlying methods increase the risk of error in something fairly critical. A simple command-line based backup solution wouldn't be too difficult to add, but restore and admin-panel usage are more significant challenges once you get into it.

js4ever 5y ago

You can try Wiki.js or bookstack, both are open source and nice

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Thanks for suggesting BookStack [1]. I did initially create the project as a free open-source alternative to confluence as I didn't want financial approval being a limiter to documentation collaboration. One of the main things to consider with BookStack is the semi-fixed Shelf > Book > Chapter > Page structure (Where pages have content, chapters & shelves are optional, and Books can be within multiple shelves). For some this structure is limiting, For others it helps drive organization. [1]: https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/

plasma 5y ago

You could put Cloudflare Access (with Tunnel) in front to shield against exposing the instance directly, I’ve used it in the past for other products that has been good.

mch82 5y ago

Mediawiki has worked well. I’d be curious to hear others experiences with it. VisualEditor is an extremely good WYSIWYG interface. The wiki is able to scale well (project sites are unlikely to approach Wikipedia scale). The API is useful. Wikitext editing gives power users a lot of flexibility, though it’s not as popular as Markdown. Access control & edit-publish workflow options may be too limited for the desires of some project teams.

neovive 5y ago

My company is currently migrating off of Confluence due to the ending of the on-premise license. We found a combination of a simple web-based knowledgebase app for public content and Office 365/Teams -- which we already license.