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Comment by nerdbaggy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is a huge market for something as powerful as confluence but not as terrible as confluence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software Try some of these first before coming up with yet another wiki software.

Yes, and I'm currently building that [1].

But there are a few alternative to Confluence today. Whether it is Notion (not too good for technical documentation, true), Slab, Clubhouse (not the audio app) or even Quip. They mostly fit companies which are under 150 people. Managing documentation with an external tool is hard because technical documentation is better when closest to the source code

[1] https://dokkument.com/

I’m very interested in seeing how Dokkument turns out. There are too many documentation tools that:

1) have horrible navigation 2) lack a good editing experience / CMS, especially when working with a lot of images & videos. Markdown is actually distracting in this case because I have to break my workflow to upload these assets to my CDN. 3) are not designed to meet the needs of product marketing - they can’t have analytics added or they can’t be branded to match the rest of the marketing website.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right tool yet.

That's an interesting question. You need to differentiate two types of tools.

1. Internal knowledge bases. 2. Customer help centers.

1. are internal only and usually a tool like Confluence, Notion, or Sharepoint is used. Except from Sharepoint their designs are not very customizable. Because that's not the main use case of these tools

2. are customer facing and is usually easier to customize. There are plenty of tools but they mostly follow the initial "intercom" [1] help center design. A few categories with a bunch of articles and folders inside. They are usually not really great tools. On the navigation part there are still a lot of innovation to be done because we still don't know how to orient people who are novice

[1] https://www.intercom.com/help/en/

Thanks for clarifying. That’s exactly the problem that I’m facing. There really needs to be a third option that doesn’t follow the Intercom style of docs that is also suitable for marketing use.

In an ideal world, navigation would be chapter-style, similar to Stripe’s docs.

I’m currently using Docusaurus as my public docs site, but it isn’t ideal because 1) it’s cumbersome to manage a lot of uploaded content and 2) it is not particularly easy to manage the navigation.

I’m thinking of rolling my own within my marketing site (that’s built in Gatsby) and using a suitable CMS but I’d certainly like to avoid the time investment.

We use Quip and the difference with Confluence, which we used before, is that the rest of the organisation (the non-tech departments) adopted it really quickly.

That told me that Quip seems to be much more intuitive and easier to use for less technical people.

I agree. Gitbook/Readme are best solution I found so far. I like more gitbook, but they could improve the I18n support.

I see all missing a way to create other pages for content marketing (e.g. Academy, Blog etc..).

quip and slab (to a lesser degree, guru) are better experiences, but literally none of them will let me CI my codebase's documentation, or even so much as upload a zip file. It would be very nice to host private documentation in a linkable format, but behind a login, since, it is private documentation.

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