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Comment by m_eiman | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions on what to use instead of Confluence? Need to run on-prem, it's mostly the wiki-like features I'm interested in.

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> Need to run on-prem, it's mostly the wiki-like features I'm interested in.

Since you are looking mostly for the wiki part there is Dokuwiki which is magnitudes better at being a wiki. Remember, wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick or something to that effect and whatever Confluence is it isn't quick.

Don't know how well it will hold up under scrutiny if black hats gets a reason to swarm over it, but unlike Confluence you can hire someone to patch the guts of it if necessary.

Edit: I have no reason to believe it is worse than anything else, I'm just pointing out it probably hasn't had so much exposure to help it harden.

For a non-technical user group you likely want something more WYSIWYG than Dokuwiki.

Maybe. But I have a hunch that we are severely underestimating huge parts of the workforce.

I mean: ux discussions often feels like they assume users are a separate species somewhere between ordinary humans and chimps when it comes to intelligence.

I have some experience with training users and I have only given up once.

I fully agree that you can train users for a lot. But the question is if it's worth doing so in the specific case. And wikis often already have trouble with people not using them enough, making them seemingly hard to use doesn't help.

Don't forget that in many ways some real wikis like Dokuwiki are simpler and more user-friendly than Confluence:

- you can edit a paragraph without locking or creating conflicts for the whole page

- it is much faster, and as far as I can see the observe–orient–decide–act loop is a real thing and should be taken into account

- much better wiki syntax (compared to old Confluence)

- trivially extensible so you can create forms and other helpers to make it simpler for users to do the right thing

- if one absolutely need it I think there exist at least one wysiwyg extension for Dokuwiki

In my experience, it depends on the industry and company how competent their users will be. I've been a training (back when thinngs were in person) where a user started getting irate because their login wouldn't work to our software. The trainer walked over to see what was going on, and the user was trying to put their login credentials into their bank website instead of ours.

These were sales people.

So often, somewhere right above a chimp is where some of your users are.

I am considering going with Bookstack Wiki for my company. But I am not a Fortune500 company.

I would say it is very darn complete, perhaps without the syntactic linking that Confluence has. The only thing missing from it, is a very solid backup and restore method from the admin panel. The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem".

> The authors want users to rely on database backups and file level backups, that must be handled manually. Essentially saying "not my problem".

Just a note on this, this is something I'd like to build in eventually. It's just that each layer of our own we add upon the underlying methods increase the risk of error in something fairly critical.

A simple command-line based backup solution wouldn't be too difficult to add, but restore and admin-panel usage are more significant challenges once you get into it.

Mediawiki has worked well. I’d be curious to hear others experiences with it.

VisualEditor is an extremely good WYSIWYG interface. The wiki is able to scale well (project sites are unlikely to approach Wikipedia scale). The API is useful. Wikitext editing gives power users a lot of flexibility, though it’s not as popular as Markdown.

Access control & edit-publish workflow options may be too limited for the desires of some project teams.

My company is currently migrating off of Confluence due to the ending of the on-premise license. We found a combination of a simple web-based knowledgebase app for public content and Office 365/Teams -- which we already license.

You could put Cloudflare Access (with Tunnel) in front to shield against exposing the instance directly, I’ve used it in the past for other products that has been good.

I migrated every confluence instance over to XWiki, since the Australian backdoor law[1].

http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

https://xwiki.com/en/try-xwiki/

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

You can try Wiki.js or bookstack, both are open source and nice

Thanks for suggesting BookStack [1]. I did initially create the project as a free open-source alternative to confluence as I didn't want financial approval being a limiter to documentation collaboration.

One of the main things to consider with BookStack is the semi-fixed Shelf > Book > Chapter > Page structure (Where pages have content, chapters & shelves are optional, and Books can be within multiple shelves). For some this structure is limiting, For others it helps drive organization.

[1]: https://www.bookstackapp.com/

What target group? Devs? Po? General org?

I'll just go with "Yes" because we use the same Confluence installation our entire organisation. Spaces might be configured differently, but we can have all our documentation in one system and link across space.

There really isn't that many alternatives, SharePoint maybe, but then you're just suggestion something worse.

Biased but I'm actually building a competitor (V1 is almost ready) to Confluence for medium to big organizations. But I don't understand your requirement for on-prem. That's clearly not an advantage from the security point of view. Apart from Quip, Sharepoint and Confluence (soon stopped) I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem. The only thing that you can hope for, is "bring your bucket" in which static resources can be uploaded in your S3/Google/Azure bucket and some managed instance (like Atlassion Cloud) for the app. But on prem is going to be something from the past honestly

>I'm not sure there is any commercial knowledge base tool that are available on-prem.

XWiki?

I personally do not categorize them to equivalent to Confluence, Sharepoint, Notion, Quip, ... but if you do, yeah there are few wiki software which are available on premise.

What can confluence do what XWiki cannot? But i understand that you try to promote your cloud offering ;)

I'm not trying to promote my cloud offering. I would like to be able to offer self hosting, but we still haven't found a way to do it. This is too much hassle for everyone. There is a tradeoff between ease of use of a software and the security process. A collaboration tool which is difficult to update and thus will not evolve quickly is an issue for its adoption and for its benefits.

Well first its interface, if a non technical user can't user the tool that's going to be a big problem. Confluence has not the best interface but still better than Xwiki. The best the interface the better the adoption as a whole in the company. And for knowledge sharing adoption is critical. That's actually why Notion has been such a success recently. Even though their product is average, people want to use it, because they like the interface.

I don't have the time to do a full comparaison of other features, but wiki tools are in usage very different than collaboration tools. Can you have the list of last consulted documents ? Can you embed external documents ? ... Kind of the same things as Slack vs IRC

>I don't have the time to do a full comparison of other features

That should be your first prio before anyone locks one's information into your system...XWiki can import and export confluence and even wikimedia data, i never use a system when in cant import/export to the the next best product.

Confluence can take text and turn it into a black box format shoved inside a database that you can't edit with a real editor, then shove that text into a black box unstandardized version control system shoved inside a database! Take that, other tools!

> black box format shoved inside a database

Are you drunk? Who tf ever wants that?

Sorry, must have lost some context... nobody wants that if they know what they are doing. I don't want it. I'm saying this is the reality behind confluence. (and I don't like it either!)

Plenty of deployments will continue to be on-prem, cloud is not perfect for 100% of use cases.

Example: If you are a semiconductor manufacturer, you probably are not going to be storing all the documentation about your bleeding edge fabs on a cloud provider.

Being able to self-host is a hard requirement for many organizations. Especially for tools like a wiki, which may contain proprietary/secret business information.

The last time we reviewed the Atlassian Cloud hosted products, they did not meet our security needs (requirements include isolated tenant from other customers, customer managed keys, etc) though they were much closer than a few years earlier. We also review the general security practices of the company (for example to make sure they implement a secure SDLC and follow other security best-practices).

The issue is that to put company data on your server, we need IT security people to sign off on it. That takes years and a lot of budget, just to get that authorization. It also likely comes with restrictions, like not being able to use it for very sensitive company data or government data.

In short, that’s not happening for a wiki.

PII, PHI, classified data, controlled unclassified information, proprietary trade secrets, a requirement to host user data in the country the user lives, a company is massive enough to own data centers and may as well use them. There are so many reasons to self-host. Unless your service is as big as AWS/Azure and can afford to build a private cloud in a location of the customer's choosing for sufficiently large customers, "only cloud" isn't good enough for many use cases. You're putting your own convenience as a developer ahead of the needs of certain users. Which is fine, I guess. You don't need to serve everyone. But you shouldn't be out there acting like self-hosting never makes sense. You may as well ask why some facilities have their own generators and their own wells and don't just universally hook into the public grids. Some applications have requirements for hard perimeters and self-reliance.

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