Confluence on-premise is dead, what now? | Hacker News Reader

Confluence on-premise is dead, what now?

58 pointshmottestad51 comments

Atlassian has killed off their on-premise Confluence product for small to medium sized organisations.

We currently have a 25 user license and would probably upgrade to 50 users in the next year or two. Our only option at the moment is to pay a fortune and a half and upgrade to their 500+ user (on-prem) Datacenter product. By law we are not allowed to use a cloud solution.

Most likely we will have to move to Sharepoint :(

Anyone in a similar situation?

Suggestions and recommendations would be very welcome!

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I did a bunch of research on this before leaving my last job, as we were in the same lousy spot. The top 3 contenders at the time were Xwiki (https://www.xwiki.org), Bookstack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), and BlueSpice (https://bluespice.com/) based on Mediawiki.

None of them, however, quite fit with our use cases. We needed something that non-tech people could equally contribute to and maintain (so git with static pages was out, as were the many wikis that required writing content in Markdown without a WYSIWYG UI). We needed something with tight integration with Jira, as we frequently used the ability to display Jira issue reports and auto-create wiki pages. And we preferred something that could at least display Office-doc and PDF content transparently, although that was looser. I’m glad I never had to make that call, because killing our self-hosted Confluence was going to suck badly.

I’ll never not be upset with Atlassian over that mess. I get why they did it and even kind of understand doing it, but the whole thing was handled in the most user-unfriendly, tone-deaf way possible. And then to have their godawful cloud Jira meltdown happen shortly afterwards and have them not adjust any license terms in apology for it was the topper on the cake.

Mediawiki has had WYSIWYG for quite some years now, at least.

A few months ago there was a big thread on documentation and I said I was convinced that markdown files and an SSG was the way to go, with some kind of web CMS that auto gits for the non technical people. It got a huge amount of upvotes but also got quite a few nay sayers some of whom said something along the lines of “businesses don’t care about portability” to which I said “they absolutely will if one day atlassian hikes the prices, gets acquired or the product is discontinued”. Well here we are. Keep it simple and keep it non proprietary wherever possible otherwise you are always running the risk of being held over a barrel.

Use markdown files and a SSG. It is literally free. It makes documentation quick and easy to write which means devs are more likely to actually do it. The “markdown is not very good for tables” issue has been solved long ago with either plugins such as “advanced table plugin” for Obsidian or apps like the £10 one off payment app “TableFlip” by Brett Terpstra.

Have a look at the following stuff:

- AstroJS: SSG that allows you to use any JS framework you want.

- Docusaurus: React SSG designed specifically for documentation

- SSGs in other languages: Hugo(Go), Zola(Rust), Jekyll(Ruby)

Then just Google “git cms” for a list of different options on that front. I believe Netlify cms is probably one of the most popular.

- Alternatively just write, sync and publish all in Obsidian using the Obsidian sync and publish services.

Even though it's obvious from the examples, SSG=Static Site Generator, for those who are unfamiliar with the acronym.

You’re a bit quick to jump to “I told you so”. Implied in the replies you received was “portability isn’t worth the cost, financial or otherwise”. From my experience of peoples use of Confluence, your suggestion would not be even close to a like-for-like alternative for the majority of cases.

As is always the case when trying to find viable alternatives for Atlassian products: this is harder than it seems.

I converted all the Confluence instances ~1year ago to Xwiki[1] and some smaller one's to Fossil[2].

Both are great and opensource, i am really happy about the decision...thanks Atlassian!

[1]https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

[2]https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

That's interesting. I used to sell on-premise Mediawiki support to companies that needed a wiki. Mediawiki is the open source wiki written for and used by Wikipedia.

Obviously there's a bit of a difference in philosophy between Mediawiki and Confluence. But they are otherwise quite comparable in capabilities when it comes to outright information-sharing. Last I worked in this space, there were conversion tools between the two.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

And the search feature of MediaWiki probably works...

Built in mediawiki search is ... well it's already ok, especially if you practice a bit. And you are not constrained to plain search, there are a number of different systems you can use to organize and browse through your data.

Of course there are also a number of semi-external search engines you can add on if you want that can improve results for plain search.

Finally, mediawiki tends to be a fairly rich/high quality data source for general purpose search engines to ingest. If you have a reasonably sized intranet that also happens to have a mediawiki wiki on it, you might end up getting better results for everything, not just the wiki.

For a very loose definition of "works", maybe

What is an average monthly support cost for an org with 50-100 employees?

That's a really good question. A really large organization might be Eur 2000/month, but 90% of the time that was helping with moderation, which I'd recommend if you start going over Dunbar's number. [1]

For a small org of 50-100 on prem? That's practically idling. Once it's set up it can run almost indefinitely without anyone looking at it all too much. Depends on if you already have someone on site who can watch over an extra LAMP [2] server/vm/[docker] container, run occasional backups etc.

[1] Wikis have interesting properties wrt. Dunbar's number which do not quite fit in this margin.

[2] Linux/Apache/MariaDB/PHP

+ my mail address is in my profile if you'd like more details!

Or maybe:

https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Everyone hates on confluence, but the one thing that's really hard to find elsewhere is their inline annotation/commenting.

This: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/comment-...

The comments are tied to specific sections, and sit in a sidebar. So you're commenting on a specific section, or even passage of text. It really makes a code-review style flow for content dead easy. If anyone knows of a similar capability in another product, I'd love to hear about it.

I have no idea how far along they are, but I remembered seeing this exchange earlier: https://twitter.com/getoutline/status/1589765154882797568. If you’re seriously considering switching off Confluence, maybe give them a ping?

I setup a Wiki.js install as a contingency documentation plan for our company when Atlassian had their major outage last year. I liked it.

I also like how the documents are literally markdown files and you can synchronize/backup the data to a git repo and the data isn’t even reliant on the wiki.js instance you run to be readable.

What about Outline [0]? The self install process isn’t very hard and you lose a decade of enterprise cruft.

[0]: https://www.getoutline.com/

+1 for outline. we use it in our office too (~150 people organization). with notion-like interface, plenty of app integrations, realtime collaborative editing I couldn't be happier with our documentation needs

Mediawiki? I have seen once a decent on-premise setup in 200+ people company. It is expensive though (you need an engineer supporting it, at least part time).

There are quite a few open-source wiki solutions that you might consider self-hosting. What are some killer features that you’d consider Confluence to be great at?

We run a managed support function so if you need help, we can take on supporting you with a different product in place of Atlassian.

https://alternativeto.net/software/confluence/?license=opens...

Check out OneNote. Its shared notebooks should scale to 25-50 users. At a past employer, we used OneNote successfully at that scale instead of a wiki type solution. OneNote has a decent Mac app so it works in environments with both Windows and Macs.

My biggest gripe is the lack of native code block support. There are ok workarounds but something native would be better.

Edit:

> By law we are not allowed to use a cloud solution.

Missed this on my first read. Shared notebooks should be able to be stored wherever you store things in your network.

I mean this seriously, consider moving documentation to your version control system and save your documentation in markdown. Markdown is powerful enough to format and store documentation of most forms you might need, combine that with a VCS of your choice and you’re set. All documentation changes are tracked and stored alongside your code changes. As a bonus, you won’t have to pay atlassian or deal with the clunky confluence UI!

Companies don't only use Confluence as a documentation wiki. That's often the least of the use.

Think "Intranet CMS". Announcements, event signup pages, "feelgood stories", all kinds of digital resources, and all with lots and lots of macros.

Sales won't commit their success story with a customer to your git repo. Marketing won't share their corporate design templates in your git repo.

Markdown is not very good for tables for example. Both its syntax and the options it supports for tables are far from being enough to replace what you usually find a wiki system.

> Markdown is powerful enough to format and store documentation of most forms you might need

I find AsciiDoc to be more robust, but I agree broadly that using text-based documentation in version control – and, ideally, published via the same kind of VCS-driven automation you’d use to build and pubish software from source – is the best way to do things.

Not the same thing, but...

I really wanted to have a nice private wiki at home, but i loathed (and still loathe) editing markdown files to do that. I really liked the editing experience in Confluence.

I was about to buy the self-hosted license and accept the 4GB-minimum-requirement tax, but then I gave MediaWiki a try, and so far i've never looked back.

Getting into mediawiki is definitely a journey, and it has it quirks, but it's been a lovely experience so far. It looks very nice (I'm using the Timeless skin with some minor css tweaks) and editing is a joy (the VisualEditor extension is now bundled with MediaWiki).

Also, turns out there are some companies selling specialized MediaWiki consulting, and there also is a company that sells its own MediaWiki "distribution" with some additional enterprise features (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/BlueSpice/en).

We're using Bookstack [0] in our organization and are very happy with it.

It checked all the boxes with respect to a WYSIWYG editor, configurable permissions and OAuth authentication.

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

Wiki.js might be an alternative

https://js.wiki/

Anyone using OprnProject? https://www.openproject.org/

Thanks for prompting us about OpenProject. Seems full-featured and a competitive replacement of JIRA but not Confluence.

For wiki, as Confluence is, I'd rather propose something like Dendron.so[1]

1. https://wiki.dendron.so

https://twiki.org/ is powerful but not user friendly (by today’s standards) -> https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/twiki+confluence

I use mkdocs for my company and it works great. To be honest, before I trust any business process with software from a US company I think what would happen if they double or triple their price on me, which they usually do. Plus if you have any PII data I still don’t know how to make things compliant with EU regulations.

Why are so many companies so hostile against self-hosted versions of their product?

I know the answer but I don't like my own answer. When a company hosts it's own code, they are in control of how it and the infrastructure their code is running on are managed. They can keep everyone on the same version and ensure all the servers are managed following a specific process. If there is a critical bug they can patch it right away, sometimes without getting into details.

When people host a companies code, the vendor ends up with a lot more support cases due to externalities that the vendor does not control and the customers of the product will tweak and modify it in ways the vendor did not expect and does not support. The customer can see under the hood and find embarrassing mistakes. The customer may have network configurations and use cases that the vendor never expected their application to reside and function in.

There are pros and cons to each method and both the vendor and customer stand to benefit from one method over the other but ultimately the vendor has to decide if they are willing to take on the extra support load and extra time to work with the customer to ensure best practices are followed for the app, the servers, for backups, for disaster recovery procedures, etc... In most cases the vendor does not have the ability to debug a customer hosted instance directly and depend on working with intermediaries sometimes over video chat screen sharing sessions.

You fell for the classic corporate excuse ;)

Vendors are not suppressing self hosting due to technical overhead. In fact, you shrink both your operational expenses and technical overhead by delegating to your customers entirely running, securing, and operating your software.

Vendors are suppressing self hosting because it's not a revenue generation stream, and to peddle back FOSS commitments. Customers are required to pay for a cloud-hosted version, while self hosted is free. And while they're at it, why continue to support open source once you cripple the self hosted version and only support the opaque cloud version?

This same playbook has been executed time and time again. Elastic comes to mind as a prominent example.

You fell for the classic corporate excuse ;)

That's why I said I don't like my own answer. I know its conditionally half true and I have always preferred to host things myself. I can put the right security controls in place and I can coordinate patch management to not conflict with customer code patch management. I am also a bit jaded after dealing with three-letter-agency funded hardware that must have a cloud connection to perform big data analysis on logs and totally not to have that back door connection into the datacenter and psychologically condition the network team into expected to see hundreds of GB of data flow to a cloud provider. But I tried as best I could to keep that out of my answer.

the kind of experienced user like you is not the one causing to many support issues. the difficulty is knowing which users are, and being able to charge them appropriately

This so much.

As a developer I never want to work on anything that isn't "cloud" (meaning hosted by us on our infra) ever again. It is sooooo much better in every way.

As a customer I hate cloud stuff. I wanna host it myself and have full control.

I understand and agree with every point you have made.

There are two business reasons I see that providing a self-hosted solution would actually be beneficial. First, it would expand the market potential to include companies that for whatever reason do not want to use the cloud system. Second, it would give another revenue outlet by charging hefty fees for support. How many companies like Apple sell a warranty that the purchaser might not ever use? I could see that happening here too.

if they also run cloud, they are then responsible for 2 versions of the same softwares and the self-hosted versions make far less money. Also, when you google for confluence vulnerabilites, you'll see that every single story is about a customer with a self-hosted version. So self-hosted is also more insecure for most customer.

Cruel to get our hopes up like that.

Fossil is good. Some form of wiki based thing with the roots in distributed source control works well.

I understand that it depends for what docs you use Confluence,

but if Sharepoint is an option, could it also be Nextcloud ?

Yes, same story, and also Sharepoint. Because it's already there, with Microsoft 365. My joy is… limited.

I am also looking for an alternative. What about self hosted mediawiki?

There are plenty of open source wikis like Mediawiki.

WordPress?

on-premises*

Hah, I had never realized that, but after some digging it turns out you are absolutely right. In fact, ‘premise’ and ‘premises’ have actually very different meanings.

This article summarizes it nicely. [1]

[1] https://www.govloop.com/on-premise-vs-on-premises-the-debate...

it's 2023, use cloud

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