HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's a modern alternative to Confluence for small dev teams?

5 points by ivarojha ↗ HN
All my dev docs are spread across Notion, Google Drive, a Github repo and text notes in Slack. I'm currently hiring devs and figured I should get these in order first.

A place where you can save dev onboarding, design docs, api docs, devops stuff, emergency handbook, potentially connect Github for code search, connect Linear and maybe other frequently used dev tools. And it all feels effortless to maintain and sync.

In my previous experiences at startups, we used Confluence and Phabricator. Is there anything new startups use these days?

6 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 23.4 ms ] thread
toomuchtodo
Why not make Notion the canonical system of record for this? Github is for code, Slack is for ephemeral chat. Anything that must persists should be stored in Notion (and you can link to Github references from within Notion).
trcarney
Something we are working on my team is an internal Astro Starlight site. It is all in markdown so if your team is backend focused, the can still maintain it, and then all the docs are markdown files that are tracked with git. Comes with basic search already built in too.

So far we like the idea of this approach but haven't fully set it up yet

prxtl
It doesn't completely fit your needs (does anything?), but I really like Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) especially because stuff like Notion and Confluence feels so slow and bloated.
ProcessOptimist
You're hitting on the biggest problem with dev docs: they're always scattered because well they just want to jump straight back into coding.

For what you're describing, a place for onboarding, docs, and connecting to dev tools like GitHub, Superthread is a good fit. The layout is a lot more opinionated than Notion to reduce clunky navigation or UI.

It’s a place where docs and tasks are connected, so you're not jumping between a wiki and a task tracker. Specifically for devs it also has sprint functionality.

[https://superthread.com/]