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Confluence on-premise is dead, what now?

• Tomte 4y ago
  Yes, same story, and also Sharepoint. Because it's already there, with Microsoft 365. My joy is… limited.
• jason2323 4y ago
  I mean this seriously, consider moving documentation to your version control system and save your documentation in markdown. Markdown is powerful enough to format and store documentation of most forms you might need, combine that with a VCS of your choice and you’re set. All documentation changes are tracked and stored alongside your code changes. As a bonus, you won’t have to pay atlassian or deal with the clunky confluence UI!
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    Markdown is not very good for tables for example. Both its syntax and the options it supports for tables are far from being enough to replace what you usually find a wiki system.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Markdown is powerful enough to format and store documentation of most forms you might need I find AsciiDoc to be more robust, but I agree broadly that using text-based documentation in version control – and, ideally, published via the same kind of VCS-driven automation you’d use to build and pubish software from source – is the best way to do things.
  • Tomte 4y ago
    Companies don't only use Confluence as a documentation wiki. That's often the least of the use. Think "Intranet CMS". Announcements, event signup pages, "feelgood stories", all kinds of digital resources, and all with lots and lots of macros. Sales won't commit their success story with a customer to your git repo. Marketing won't share their corporate design templates in your git repo.
• xet7 4y ago
  https://alternativeto.net/software/confluence/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/confluence/?license=opens...
• xet7 4y ago
  Or maybe: https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
• ivan_gammel 4y ago
  Mediawiki? I have seen once a decent on-premise setup in 200+ people company. It is expensive though (you need an engineer supporting it, at least part time).
• Drybones 4y ago
  I setup a Wiki.js install as a contingency documentation plan for our company when Atlassian had their major outage last year. I liked it. I also like how the documents are literally markdown files and you can synchronize/backup the data to a git repo and the data isn’t even reliant on the wiki.js instance you run to be readable.
• kfk 4y ago
  I use mkdocs for my company and it works great. To be honest, before I trust any business process with software from a US company I think what would happen if they double or triple their price on me, which they usually do. Plus if you have any PII data I still don’t know how to make things compliant with EU regulations.
• philwelch 4y ago
  There are plenty of open source wikis like Mediawiki.
• ensemblehq 4y ago
  There are quite a few open-source wiki solutions that you might consider self-hosting. What are some killer features that you’d consider Confluence to be great at? We run a managed support function so if you need help, we can take on supporting you with a different product in place of Atlassian.
• Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  That's interesting. I used to sell on-premise Mediawiki support to companies that needed a wiki. Mediawiki is the open source wiki written for and used by Wikipedia. Obviously there's a bit of a difference in philosophy between Mediawiki and Confluence. But they are otherwise quite comparable in capabilities when it comes to outright information-sharing. Last I worked in this space, there were conversion tools between the two. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
  • denysvitali 4y ago
    And the search feature of MediaWiki probably works...
    • verall 4y ago
      For a very loose definition of "works", maybe
    • Kim_Bruning 4y ago
      Built in mediawiki search is ... well it's already ok, especially if you practice a bit. And you are not constrained to plain search, there are a number of different systems you can use to organize and browse through your data. Of course there are also a number of semi-external search engines you can add on if you want that can improve results for plain search. Finally, mediawiki tends to be a fairly rich/high quality data source for general purpose search engines to ingest. If you have a reasonably sized intranet that also happens to have a mediawiki wiki on it, you might end up getting better results for everything, not just the wiki.
  • ivan_gammel 4y ago
    What is an average monthly support cost for an org with 50-100 employees?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • 4y ago
• rcarr 4y ago
  A few months ago there was a big thread on documentation and I said I was convinced that markdown files and an SSG was the way to go, with some kind of web CMS that auto gits for the non technical people. It got a huge amount of upvotes but also got quite a few nay sayers some of whom said something along the lines of “businesses don’t care about portability” to which I said “they absolutely will if one day atlassian hikes the prices, gets acquired or the product is discontinued”. Well here we are. Keep it simple and keep it non proprietary wherever possible otherwise you are always running the risk of being held over a barrel. Use markdown files and a SSG. It is literally free. It makes documentation quick and easy to write which means devs are more likely to actually do it. The “markdown is not very good for tables” issue has been solved long ago with either plugins such as “advanced table plugin” for Obsidian or apps like the £10 one off payment app “TableFlip” by Brett Terpstra. Have a look at the following stuff: - AstroJS: SSG that allows you to use any JS framework you want. - Docusaurus: React SSG designed specifically for documentation - SSGs in other languages: Hugo(Go), Zola(Rust), Jekyll(Ruby) Then just Google “git cms” for a list of different options on that front. I believe Netlify cms is probably one of the most popular. - Alternatively just write, sync and publish all in Obsidian using the Obsidian sync and publish services.
  • sj4nz 4y ago
    Even though it's obvious from the examples, SSG=Static Site Generator, for those who are unfamiliar with the acronym.
  • KyeRussell 4y ago
    You’re a bit quick to jump to “I told you so”. Implied in the replies you received was “portability isn’t worth the cost, financial or otherwise”. From my experience of peoples use of Confluence, your suggestion would not be even close to a like-for-like alternative for the majority of cases. As is always the case when trying to find viable alternatives for Atlassian products: this is harder than it seems.
• nix23 4y ago
  I converted all the Confluence instances ~1year ago to Xwiki[1] and some smaller one's to Fossil[2]. Both are great and opensource, i am really happy about the decision...thanks Atlassian! [1]https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome [2]https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
• aestetix 4y ago
  Why are so many companies so hostile against self-hosted versions of their product?
  • LinuxBender 4y ago
    I know the answer but I don't like my own answer. When a company hosts it's own code, they are in control of how it and the infrastructure their code is running on are managed. They can keep everyone on the same version and ensure all the servers are managed following a specific process. If there is a critical bug they can patch it right away, sometimes without getting into details. When people host a companies code, the vendor ends up with a lot more support cases due to externalities that the vendor does not control and the customers of the product will tweak and modify it in ways the vendor did not expect and does not support. The customer can see under the hood and find embarrassing mistakes. The customer may have network configurations and use cases that the vendor never expected their application to reside and function in. There are pros and cons to each method and both the vendor and customer stand to benefit from one method over the other but ultimately the vendor has to decide if they are willing to take on the extra support load and extra time to work with the customer to ensure best practices are followed for the app, the servers, for backups, for disaster recovery procedures, etc... In most cases the vendor does not have the ability to debug a customer hosted instance directly and depend on working with intermediaries sometimes over video chat screen sharing sessions.
    • tharkun__ 4y ago
      This so much. As a developer I never want to work on anything that isn't "cloud" (meaning hosted by us on our infra) ever again. It is sooooo much better in every way. As a customer I hate cloud stuff. I wanna host it myself and have full control.
    • lopkeny12ko 4y ago
      You fell for the classic corporate excuse ;) Vendors are not suppressing self hosting due to technical overhead. In fact, you shrink both your operational expenses and technical overhead by delegating to your customers entirely running, securing, and operating your software. Vendors are suppressing self hosting because it's not a revenue generation stream, and to peddle back FOSS commitments. Customers are required to pay for a cloud-hosted version, while self hosted is free. And while they're at it, why continue to support open source once you cripple the self hosted version and only support the opaque cloud version? This same playbook has been executed time and time again. Elastic comes to mind as a prominent example.
• cpach 4y ago
  Wiki.js might be an alternative https://js.wiki/ https://js.wiki/
• zomgwat 4y ago
  Check out OneNote. Its shared notebooks should scale to 25-50 users. At a past employer, we used OneNote successfully at that scale instead of a wiki type solution. OneNote has a decent Mac app so it works in environments with both Windows and Macs. My biggest gripe is the lack of native code block support. There are ok workarounds but something native would be better. Edit: > By law we are not allowed to use a cloud solution. Missed this on my first read. Shared notebooks should be able to be stored wherever you store things in your network.
• sureglymop 4y ago
  I am also looking for an alternative. What about self hosted mediawiki?
• JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Cruel to get our hopes up like that. Fossil is good. Some form of wiki based thing with the roots in distributed source control works well.
• singhrac 4y ago
  What about Outline [0]? The self install process isn’t very hard and you lose a decade of enterprise cruft. [0]: https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
  • azophy_2 4y ago
    +1 for outline. we use it in our office too (~150 people organization). with notion-like interface, plenty of app integrations, realtime collaborative editing I couldn't be happier with our documentation needs
• castillar76 4y ago
  I did a bunch of research on this before leaving my last job, as we were in the same lousy spot. The top 3 contenders at the time were Xwiki (https://www.xwiki.org https://www.xwiki.org), Bookstack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/), and BlueSpice (https://bluespice.com/ https://bluespice.com/) based on Mediawiki. None of them, however, quite fit with our use cases. We needed something that non-tech people could equally contribute to and maintain (so git with static pages was out, as were the many wikis that required writing content in Markdown without a WYSIWYG UI). We needed something with tight integration with Jira, as we frequently used the ability to display Jira issue reports and auto-create wiki pages. And we preferred something that could at least display Office-doc and PDF content transparently, although that was looser. I’m glad I never had to make that call, because killing our self-hosted Confluence was going to suck badly. I’ll never not be upset with Atlassian over that mess. I get why they did it and even kind of understand doing it, but the whole thing was handled in the most user-unfriendly, tone-deaf way possible. And then to have their godawful cloud Jira meltdown happen shortly afterwards and have them not adjust any license terms in apology for it was the topper on the cake.
  • Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    Mediawiki has had WYSIWYG for quite some years now, at least.
• paulryanrogers 4y ago
  WordPress?
• LunarAurora 4y ago
  https://twiki.org/ https://twiki.org/ is powerful but not user friendly (by today’s standards) -> https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/twiki+confluence https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/twiki+confluence
• simon04 4y ago
  Anyone using OprnProject? https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
  • vladsanchez 4y ago
    Thanks for prompting us about OpenProject. Seems full-featured and a competitive replacement of JIRA but not Confluence. For wiki, as Confluence is, I'd rather propose something like Dendron.so[1] 1. https://wiki.dendron.so https://wiki.dendron.so
• mcc1ane 4y ago
  on-premises*
  • pacificmint 4y ago
    Hah, I had never realized that, but after some digging it turns out you are absolutely right. In fact, ‘premise’ and ‘premises’ have actually very different meanings. This article summarizes it nicely. [1] [1] https://www.govloop.com/on-premise-vs-on-premises-the-debate-and-resolution/ https://www.govloop.com/on-premise-vs-on-premises-the-debate...
• MarcusE1W 4y ago
  I understand that it depends for what docs you use Confluence, but if Sharepoint is an option, could it also be Nextcloud ?
• thunderbong 4y ago
  We're using Bookstack [0] in our organization and are very happy with it. It checked all the boxes with respect to a WYSIWYG editor, configurable permissions and OAuth authentication. [0]: https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/
• kris_wayton 4y ago
  Everyone hates on confluence, but the one thing that's really hard to find elsewhere is their inline annotation/commenting. This: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/comment-on-pages-and-blog-posts/ https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/comment-... The comments are tied to specific sections, and sit in a sidebar. So you're commenting on a specific section, or even passage of text. It really makes a code-review style flow for content dead easy. If anyone knows of a similar capability in another product, I'd love to hear about it.
  • singhrac 4y ago
    I have no idea how far along they are, but I remembered seeing this exchange earlier: https://twitter.com/getoutline/status/1589765154882797568 https://twitter.com/getoutline/status/1589765154882797568. If you’re seriously considering switching off Confluence, maybe give them a ping?
• cypherg 4y ago
  it's 2023, use cloud
• znpy 4y ago
  Not the same thing, but... I really wanted to have a nice private wiki at home, but i loathed (and still loathe) editing markdown files to do that. I really liked the editing experience in Confluence. I was about to buy the self-hosted license and accept the 4GB-minimum-requirement tax, but then I gave MediaWiki a try, and so far i've never looked back. Getting into mediawiki is definitely a journey, and it has it quirks, but it's been a lovely experience so far. It looks very nice (I'm using the Timeless skin with some minor css tweaks) and editing is a joy (the VisualEditor extension is now bundled with MediaWiki). Also, turns out there are some companies selling specialized MediaWiki consulting, and there also is a company that sells its own MediaWiki "distribution" with some additional enterprise features (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/BlueSpice/en https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/BlueSpice/en).