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Comment by nerdbaggy | Hacker News Reader

The market is so ripe for somebody to take over the Confluence market. I need a documentation platform that has the WYSIWYG aspects like Confluence, be overall less terrible, and can support global replication. I can’t find anything like it for toughly the same price point.

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I just want Markdown support in my Atlassian tools. Every time I write a comment on a JIRA ticket, the submitted comment is garbled by whatever formatting the editor thought I was using.

Once you get used to markdown in something like, say, Trello you really feel it when moving to something without like, say, Monday.

A team of engineers may prefer to spend inordinate amounts of time managing an internal docs project just because confluence doesn't do markdown :|

I think it's a deliberate (and, in my opinion, poor) business model similar to mobile app stores: Atlassian has a small army of plugin developers who sell their plugins for the platform (and plenty of Markdown related plugins for this purpose, for example), and Atlassian takes a big cut of that (I think something like 20%).

On that note, why are all the editors different in their system? Between Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, each one has its own edit box, its own markup in there, and none of them are wildly pleasing.

On top of that, one thing they have in common is it takes 5-10s to load and 5-10s more to save any page (their hosted).

They're headed(ish) in this direction. In both Jira and Confluence, the newer editors support Markdown keystrokes that translate into a wysiwyg view. Jira is currently a mess, though, because it has a random mix of new editor and old wiki-style markup.

Another plus for notion. I just wish they supported multiple accounts.

I currently write in notion and export to confluence because I can’t stand the sluggishness of atlassian products.

What’s your “export to Confluence” step? That’s not natively supported is it?

We've been working on an open source alternative over at http://getoutline.com – it should check a lot of your boxes!

That actually seems pretty cool!

This looks great. I think I might just give it a go!

it's a good product, started to use this at the startup I work.

- right pricing - minimal feature set - good slack integration - decent markdown support

would love to know more about security for the hosted version.

Does the self hosted version store all the data on the hosting system?

Nope, you'd use your own postgres database if self-hosting

So all data is stored in the postgres db?

I was looking into the github/outline and saw some references to AWS/S3. That’s the reason I am asking if all data goes to the self-hosting system.

Documents are stored in the DB in Markdown, other Image uploads etc go to S3

I don’t know if it meets all your checkboxes, but Notion is _amazing_.

Yeah it is really really really nice but not quite what we are looking for

Notion is nice if your team is small enough, but it becomes extremely cumbersome to manage once you have a decent enough sized team.

Can you please elaborate? Why so?

One thing I really like about notion is how usable it is as a solo user. Its free tier will get you very far, and as a tool it's very cheap if you end up hitting the free tier limits.

My team has been using Slite, and we've been pretty happy with it. We use Clubhouse too so I'm eager to try out their new product.

Slite customer here! We've been happy with Slite but could be more fast & offline support would be awesome.

For project management we've been using Trello and it is so far so good. I think I'll give Clubhouse a spin.

Shameless plug -- try out Documize if you are looking for Confluence alternative.

It's built with Go and EmberJS.

* Designed for tech and non-technical user alike

* Cloud or self-host (single binary deployment)

* Open source core

* Markdown, WYSIWYG with open sourced "connectors"

* Built-in approval and versioning capabilities (no paid add-ons required)

* Secured for internal and external participants

* Opinionated content organization approach

https://github.com/documize/community

https://www.documize.com

We have Confluence. Great for product people but terrible for engineers and data scientists. Then a data scientist in my team got frustrated and installed GitLab...

Being able to work in Markdown and git tripled the amount of documentation I wrote.

You don't realise how much friction Confluence adds until you try an alternative that is fully integrated into your normal dev workflow and tooling.

Why don't got use GitHub wiki?

Like if they took all the collaboration tools from google docs and mixed it together with confluence, they’d be onto something.

Google docs does collaboration very well, but it doesn’t do all the structured inter-page navigation stuff at all

I'm trying to remember a confluence competitor startup that launched a few months ago & sort of looked like slack with their color theme. Does anyone have an idea of whom I'm talking about ?

Slite perhaps?

More like WYSI what you can't figure out how to get in my experience. Versus Mediawiki's much easier to monkey with markup.

What do you mean by global replication? Like if I publish something in New York it should be immediately accessible in Tokyo?

Doesn’t really matter what consistency level is picked. We have offices in US, South America, and Australia. Right now every single query has to come back to a central point, which isn’t great for latency. It doesn’t even need to be multi master since 99% of our page views are reads only.

Got it. That’s what I thought you meant but wasn’t sure in this context.

Can’t you just run it through a cdn somehow?

Like https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/use-a-cdn-w... , for example.

Have you looked at Tettra.co? Not affiliated, just have run across them a couple times.

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