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Ask HN: What is a good alternative to Confluence?

33 points by cryptos ↗ HN
There are lots of wiki systems, but most of them have poor usability, strange markup languages and very few social functionality (comments, alerts ...). And many of them are just ridiculously ugly. The only wiki suited for non-technical staff, I am aware of, is Confluence. But I can not believe that it is the only one.

What alternatives to Confluence do you know and recommend?

26 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] thread
gjvc
...and people call the web a success, when basic, or even advanced document processing is so wanting that questions like this need to be asked.

(please forgive the snipe, but the poster making the above point exactly illustrates some of the functional weaknesses of the extant browser model.)

loael
DokuWiki is pretty configurable and has plenty of Bootstrap styles so it's not 'ridiculously' ugly. There is also plenty of Add-ons to add further functionality.
na85
Isn't media wiki readily available? It doesn't use the latest bloat.js framework, which I think is a major positive, and it looks clear and readable on both mobile and desktop.

I suppose you have to contend with their markup language, but I'm sure someone has a WYSIWYG plugin for it.

bitshepherd
Having deployed and maintained both Confluence and MediaWiki, users like Confluence better.

Going from that to MediaWiki would feel cheap to them, or they just wouldn't use it because it would feel "hard".

cryptos
I've experience with MediaWiki, and it was not very popular. The markup language is one of the worst I've ever seen. I would prefer good, old HTML instead. But, anyway, non-technical users don't like it.
vertex-four
There’s Notion, which I’ve seen used successfully. It’s hosted, though.

https://www.notion.so/

flitzofolov
I've never seen that before, it looks pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.
was_boring
I've been using notion.so for my personal wiki. So far, I really like it. The pricing is a bit steep ($8/mo per user) for team plans though.
vertex-four
Confluence is $5 per user per month, so it’s not really out of range.
flitzofolov
Both GitHub and GitLab have built in wiki systems that support Markdown. They also support editing them in a proper editor and using git for revision control.

That said, these solutions are probably geared more towards developers, whereas in a conventional organization, many people (i.e. business folk) usually prefer a browser based solution that provides a similar experience to that of a word processor.

I never liked Confluence, but seeing as the Atlassian suite has become the de-facto industry standard, it's hard to beat its integration advantages with JIRA and such. Better a sucky single source of truth than a disparate array of wonderful solutions.

Also I think the latest versions with the UI lift are pretty good (and they support Markdown finally).

cryptos
The wikis of GitHub and GitLab are nice for developers, but I doubt that non-technical users will be happy with them. Inserting a link to a recently created page is really simple in Confluence, but there is no assistence in these wikis. Inserting a table is not simple, comments, alerts and so on are not on par with Confluence.
shen
I’ve been using Bookstack.

https://www.bookstackapp.com

captaindiego
This is really interesting, thanks for sharing this!

Do you know if there is any way to add templates when you create new pages?

This is one feature of confluence that is very useful for standardizing the way certain pages look across a large team I find useful.

burfog
You could say that MediaWiki has a strange markup language, but it is workable because Wikipedia is so popular. MediaWiki is effectively the wiki standard. Anybody who has played with Wikipedia has encountered the syntax.
Kim_Bruning
People still think mediawiki needs markup language, but you can also edit using wysiwyg. For hysterical raisins, english wikipedia has this feature turned off (but as an opt-in feature) , but eg the german wikipedia has this feature as an either-or option.

Here's the german wikipedia featured article in edit mode

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannstra%C3%9Fe_(Berlin-Neu...

Just click in the text and start editing! :-) (just remember to NOT commit your test changes . -unless you happen to write coherent German :-) )

Kim_Bruning
Hang on a minute! Of course I can direct-link to english wikipedia editing too; here you go:

If you prefer english, here's a direct-link to editing todays front-page article on en.wikipedia. Once again, don't actually commit unless you're doing something useful. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_Cascades_Na...

The above is fairly safe, but if you feel a bit nervous; here's a sandbox page that is completely safe to edit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Sandbox&vea...

AnnoyingSwede
Interesting thread as Atlassian swings up their licenses costs every year, i am also looking to cut our costs. However finding something that integrates with Jira, Bitbucket, Bamboo as well as confluence will never be possible. If anyone has suggestions to cheaper products that has those integrations (to some extent at least, or allows for the development of plugins that can do it) i would be super happy.
i_am_nomad
Before being railroaded into Confluence, I argued vociferously for XWiki (https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/). It's powerful, clean, and about as close to a Confluence replacement as you'll find anywhere. It can in fact import from Confluence. It has a number of useful extensions for it, though nowhere near as many as Confluence. Plus, it's open-source, and if you prefer the company behind the project also does convenient hosting.

Of course, it doesn't integrate seamlessly with the other Atlassian products, but if you can do without that, it's definitely worth checking out.

Kim_Bruning
Mediawiki can be configured to be both non-ugly and to be wysiwyg. By now there might even be docker containers around with it preconfigured in this mode. :)

For a while people thought wikis could be used to make corporate culture more open. They introduced curated wikis and crossed their fingers.

Internal corporate forces tend to really not like open information sharing. The way confluence is designed allows people to put a tickmark next to "we have a wiki", while still actually keeping a tight lid on what info they actually share.

It's much easier to pick tools to fit your corporate culture as opposed to changing your corporate culture to fit the tools. This is why Confluence is popular.

(whether this is good or bad is a topic for another day)

PeOe
Have a look at https://zenkit.com . We use it for almost everything in the office. It's cloud-based with different data views and you are able to build your own database.

As you mentioned, there are comment sections for each task/item with mentioning. Reminder and due dates can be established. Change the sorting with a few clicks or use the search function.

cryptos
I know Zenkit but it is not a replacement for Jira. It could possibly replace Jira in some (not so complex) scenarios, but not Confluence. And the Zenkit Android app is a disaster.
iDemonix
You haven't stated why you need a good alternative? I recently integrated Confluence at my company and it's one of the most popular things I've ever done, it's transformed our department.
cryptos
We have performance issues with Jira (cloud) and I fear the same could happen with Confluence in the cloud. Another point is license cost -- I think the price of Confluence is ok, but we have some confluence sceptics and a lower price would reduce the hurdle to introduce such a product.