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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

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.

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.

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.

>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!)

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