Question

Confluence alternatives for wiki/knowledge bases?

I've been looking to try something new for knowledge/documentation storage for a little while now. Confluence has always been there, but I find it to be relativly limited for the cost and additional plugins for integrations that help it get to full potential.

I've looked at the following but checking in with the masterful minds here in case there are any really great products I've missed or if you can vouch for any of them?

Researched/Tested
- Notion
- Nuclino
- Tettra

Found/Need to read up on
- Slite
- Bloomfire
- Guru
- Simpplr

Any help would be appriciated!

Share
sidatsupplyer's avatar
2 years ago

We're currently evaluating samepage, confluence and coda. Will keep you updated on what we decide on.

3 points
maguay's avatar
@maguay (replying to @sidatsupplyer )
2 years ago

Interesting! Which features feel the most important for your team at this point?

1 point
ben_derv's avatar
almost 3 years ago

Gosh. Here, there could be a multi-billion software solution. I haven't seen anything remotely great.
Nothing help you building and maintaining a documentation. What I would like is

(0) Something that is unbearably beautiful. Like bear.app.
Slite is close but still not there.

(1) Something which has great integration with other tools.
E.g Software tracking with git.
E.g Google Docs organisation & cleaning.
Most tools simply have a embed system and that's it.

(2) Something that keep track of your documentation, and help you structuring it & keep track of what is obsolete or unused.
As far as I am concerne, no tools does that. My guess is that it's not a financial problem because organisation that have this problem usually are already relying on the solution and paying full price. It's just sad because it should be the mission.


As a great open-source tool, you can try Outline (https://www.getoutline.com).
It's just the basic stuff, but the few things it does; it does it well.

2 points
Brucetm's avatar
@Brucetm (replying to @ben_derv )
2 years ago

(0) Slab is elegant
(1) Slab 's search can search not only documentation but also GDrive and other integrations at the same time, super useful.
(2) Archbee, Tettra and Slab have page ownership models and "this is stale" .

I've tried pretty much every wiki and documentation service out there, I think. Right now am using Clickup for personal notes and small team collab, not because it's great, it's actually frustratingly buggy, but I stick with it because it's tightly integrated with project management.

2 points
maguay's avatar
almost 3 years ago

Paligo was mentioned for more technical documentation, but could work. Docusaurus as well, for an open source/self-hosted tool.

Notion and Guru both seemed crowd favorites, especially the former (FWIW we're using Notion internally at Capiche to document internal stuff). GitBook and Helpjuice could also be worth checking out; the other tools would likely not work great for internal stuff.

Question
What product (s) do you recommend for building a client-facing knowledge base/product documentation?
Answer
MrDisinterested's avatar
9 points

Two products that I have seen rising in Knowledge management domain (Personal and Team ) are

Notion : https://www.notion.so/
Notion is something that I use on a Daily basis and within a month we have replaced more than 6 saas offerings with just Notion.

Guru : https://www.getguru.com/
The traditional concept of a knowledge base or “wiki” is becoming obsolete. Next-generation products unify information and contextually deliver knowledge directly into existing workflows. Guru is one company that has emerged as an early leader in this space.

Answer
maguay's avatar
4 points

There are a few things to balance with documentation:

  • Making the content easily reusable by support teams to speed up replying to tickets
  • Publishing the content online to anyone searching for the product plus the issue online
  • Letting anyone in the company add/update/edit documentation to keep it generally fresh

The easiest way to accomplish the first is to use the documentation tool built into your help desk or customer support tool. So if you’re already using Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Knowledge might make the most sense. If it’s anything like what Desk’s documentation tools were like before it was acquired by Salesforce, it should get the job done.

Otherwise, you can publish Confluence wikis publicly, either as read only or as an actual wiki that your customers could help edit (though that seems like it could get messy fast). If you already are writing internal documentation in Confluence, that may be your easiest route. One downside here though is that you can’t use custom domains with Confluence’s cloud app yet, so you would need to have your documentation on a separate domain (which works fine from an access perspective, though doesn’t help your company’s SEO rankings as much as having documentation on your domain could). Or, in the same way, you could expand your use of Paligo to cover non-technical documentation.

Essentially, if not adding new steps and tools to your team’s workflow is most important, any of those options would keep documentation inside stuff your team is already using. There’s no perfect solution, and frankly any CMS could be used to publish documentation (including a WordPress or Ghost blog, if you wanted, or any of the many documentation-specific tools), but using something you already are using and just adding extra processes around publishing could be the fastest way to get started.

1 point
pendolino's avatar
@pendolino (replying to @maguay )
2 years ago

So is Guru still the favorite? I'm looking for an easy/intelligent internal knowledge management tool that works great with Slack.

1 point
Evbart-'s avatar
2 years ago

Going through the same exercise. We are on confluence and finding it rigid from an organizational and permissions perspective as well as slow and antiquated from a UI perspective.

I do like features on confluence like decisions, but it’s not enough to keep me on it.

Here’s the stuff I’m looking at
- slab
- slite
- coda
- notion

1 point
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