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Ask HN: Alternatives to Atlassian Confluence?

16 points by alexbecker ↗ HN
My team currently uses Confluence (an Atlassian product) for requirements, designs, procedures, and for various other engineering and product-related documents. However, I find it slow and difficult to navigate.

Has anyone found a better alternative?

17 comments

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chrisked
You can try https://www.getoutline.com/.
neverminder
I tried. Couldn't install it on my vanilla Ubuntu server because of infinite dependency hell. Then I tried wiki.js which installed and worked fine, aside from a few minor bugs. I was actually rather surprised by absence of decent open source wiki options.
tianshuo
I played around with: https://www.notion.so/ it didn't stick. Our team is using Tapd (free, in Chinese, made by Tencent) for kanban boards, document sharing and other kinds of collaboration.
boltzmannbrain
I'm curious, why didn't Notion stick?

We started using Notion as an alternative to Confluence, but I'm not a fan. It feels too fluffy (as do other tools like Monday). Confluence can be a pain and expensive, but the UI/UX is professional.

purephase
In these situations, I find that the conversation always revolves around the tool, and not the end goal. Documentation is a lot like code, but with a lot less people willing to write it.

Confluence and it's ilk are only as good as the effort / ownership of those that are willing to put in the time. If your org is not willing, than no other tool is really going to solve the core product.

boltzmannbrain
Respectfully disagree. We may not be representative of all teams, but we did devote considerable time and energy into Confluence. No amount of love from the users can resolve application issues like slow load times, buggy draft-saving, inability to copy-paste, clunky commenting UI, etc.
deeteecee
ill agree with you for most cases except atlassian software.
stevesimmons
I could live with Confluence if it played better with Markdown
Hnrobert42
When you create a new page, click the Try the New Editor option. It handles MD inline. I still haven’t figured out how to open existing pages with the new editor.
bigtrakzapzap
tl;dr, check these sites:

https://www.wikimatrix.org

http://wiki.c2.com/?TopTenWikiEngines <- origin of the word "wiki" ( http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb )

Having setup the whole Atlassian on-prem SSO suite of apps on Linux with Git and LDAP talking to AD on Windows, it depends on your needs, as there are a variety of different wiki/collaboration solutions with different capabilities. I've also used these:

- Dokuwiki (very simple, text file-based)

- Mediawiki (LAMP / database-backed)

- SharePoint (MS $$)

- Quip

Others to look at (including sometimes CMSes)

- OneNote

- Liferay

- Drupal

- Statamic

- WordPress

Also, Confluence has tons of plugins for customization and can be made to be fast with proper configuration.

dmitripopov
I create SimpleDocServer for one of my customers as a quick-and-dirty Confluence replacement based entirely on Markdown. So if your point is information delivery and you are OK to collaborate on content creation via Git (or any other similar tool) then it might fit your needs. https://www.helpinator.com/simpledocserver.html
philpem
At the last place I worked -- and at a volunteer-run event I'm involved with -- we use DokuWiki.

The most difficult problem is getting people to use the damn thing, whatever you choose. WYSIWYG editing might help for less-experienced users (or those who don't want to learn the markup language), but I haven't looked for a plugin for that. Yet. :)

jbms
Navigation is about how you've structured things as team/company. Perhaps creating additional directory pages would help to get different views on all the pages/data in the system?

Speed: Does the server have enough RAM? Is it running with the recommended database for fastest use? Atlassian offer some guidance: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/performance-tuning-1302...