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Ask HN: Any good Confluence alternatives out there?

11 points by amylowe ↗ HN
We've been using Confluence for a while but finally got fed up with it.

Slow, uses the worst adaptation of Markdown ever without much recourse around it, awful organization tools, and I can't find anything. Ever.

Overall, there's too much going on for too little gain.

Any recommendations for an alternative?

19 comments

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zzaner
I think the experience with Confluence depends entirely on how it's run but I agree. Still not as bad as SharePoint.

I've recently discovered Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/) and rolled it out in our team in place of Confluence.

It's a pretty neat markdown wiki built on top of ProseMirror. There are some trade-offs (such as the lack of a self-hosted solution) but so far it made my life a lot easier: the UI is better, the search works as it should, the setup and maintenance are minimal.

If you're looking for a self-hosted solution, MediaWiki or DokuWiki might be better options.

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amylowe
Checking it out now, looks very clean. Self-hosting is not really requirement for us.
amylowe
Could really use a Dark theme. But so far looks pretty good.

We need something we could eventually use company-wide, and not many wikis are designed with non-technical users in mind. I'd be happy with just Markdown but a WYSIWYG editor is nice to have. Will keep testing, thanks!

randomdent
Confluence is an over-engineered nightmare. I managed to get our company to use a private Discourse install instead.
thecrumb
Dokuwiki or Foswiki?
amylowe
We are currently considering DokuWiki but heard the search is pretty slow.
ktpsns
MediaWiki is probably one of the most well-engineered Wiki engines and also performs well on small scales. With a huge amount of Extensions available, it's worth a try.
detaro
Only major potential caveat with Mediawiki is that it isn't great if you need good access control for pages, it's just not made for that. I believe Dokuwiki is better at that particular aspect.
ktpsns
It depends on whether you can map your use case on the MediaWiki approach (namespaces, user groups). There are however Extensions to provide fine tuned access.

If you look for enterprise wikis, Twiki is another good open source software with focus on features like access control. But I don't like it for its complexity.

bzalasky
I haven't actually tried it yet, but https://www.notion.so/ caught my eye recently. As far as Confluence goes, I also have problems with search, and missing notifications for comment threads.
hazz99
Disclaimer: I've only used it personally (not in a team)

Notion is amazing. It's very polished, and complex enough to enable some great functionality but not complex enough to overwhelm. Very preferable to markdown -- drag & drop multi-column pages!

akudha
I've also only used it personally. And I concur - notion is very well put together, well worth checking out
dyeje
I really like Nuclino personally. It's alot less bloated then a wiki solution.
quickthrower2
We use OneNote. I like it because of the powerful search and desktop native with caching of content
147
I’m considering entering this space, could I talk to you more in depth about pain points and your use case?

My email is in my profile.