HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's the best internal knowledge base

5 points by hellcow ↗ HN
Our company is scaling, and we're looking for a knowledge base to use internally to help train new hires and share knowledge across departments.

We're looking for good security and stability, versioning of some kind so changes aren't lost, ease-of-use so computer novices can comfortably edit things, and solid full-text search.

In a perfect world, we'd find one that's open source that we can host ourselves.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

6 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread
Tomte
Dokuwiki, MediaWiki, Confluence.
boramalper
Check out wiki.js, it is open-source, modern yet quite mature, and has a lot of storage backends that you can choose from.
Multicomp
If you can use a database, mediawiki which runs Wikipedia.

If you prefer flat text files, dokuwiki which I personally use at my company and at home.

If you already are in the atlassian stack and can't escape no matter what you do, use confluence wiki. But if you don't already have any atlassian products then stay far far away.

hellcow
Thanks all for your help. I am avoiding Atlassian, and editing a wiki is well beyond the skillset of most of our company.

Looks like we're going homegrown with a sqlite-backed markdown knowledge base. Hopefully open-sourcing it will prove useful to someone down the line.

Multicomp
Okay. Looking forward to seeing it open sourced if you choose to do so.

I don't see much difficulty difference in mediawiki or Dokuwiki wiki markup compared to markdown, so if the users are not able to do that markup, I don't see why they would be able to do markdown edits either, but that's just me.