We tried many different wiki softwares before settling on Bookstack. https://www.bookstackapp.com/
It supports various authentication methods including SAML and openid connect. No SSO tax here.
How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#72Think the popular tools out there like Notion often work well enough, the ease of use outweighs it's higher price for teams that look to expand.
If you want a free markdown based public wiki use Astro's Starlight.
A cheap private wiki can be made with Obsidian.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#73As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups. (Or Github Wiki if you can stomach it). It's free to start, and you get 10 users. By the time you have 10 people who need access, (and you can export PDF's of pages if you have one off sharing to do) you pay $50/mo. If you have 10 employees $50/mo is pocket lint.
I'm rather curious what you would put as worse options, because Confidence is by far the worst wiki I've ever touched. After well over 20 years of touching various wikis, professionally and out of curiosity... but they're not really a passion of mine so I suppose that isn't saying all that much. The only reason I would even remotely consider it is if I already had gigantic investment in Jira, and even then I'd strong…
> I'm rather curious what you would put as worse options,
Anything that requires time or money for less than 10 people.
Notion has similar problems (search sucks, performance doesn't scale), but starts costing once there's more than one person. You go from £0 to £20/mo for two people, and the chances are that at two people you're on ramen money so you don't want to be spending on... anything. Mediawiki and co require a VPS and auth/vpn/management. That's a distraction you don't need for the first 6-12 months of working at a startup. If I as a startup CTO/founding engineer spend 2 hours setting up mediawiki to spend £60 in a year on, the payback vs confluence or github wiki (which is running in seconds and is free) is when you scale to 10 people. Move to something when you have an actual need for it. By the time you're spending $64/mo on confluence users (or £100/mo on notion - sorry for currency switch but confluences pricing is only in USD for me), you're spending 10x that on payroll _management_. It's just a nothingburger.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#74As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups. (Or Github Wiki if you can stomach it). It's free to start, and you get 10 users. By the time you have 10 people who need access, (and you can export PDF's of pages if you have one off sharing to do) you pay $50/mo. If you have 10 employees $50/mo is pocket lint.
> As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups Confluence is so bad it reminds of that meme: "I expected nothing and I am still dissapointed". It's so bad I would be happy to use github wiki over it, even if my employer wasn't using github for version control.
Github wiki is fine - the problem for me is that I work in teams and on products where a sizable amount of the team don't use github.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's Confluence cloud. I've looked for documents I myself have written, using the keywords I knew were in the title, and got irrelevant random pages. It's ridiculous.
This was my experience as well except even worse. When my employer was acquired by evil mega corp ISP, they took away our mediawiki and replaced it with confluence. But they also didn't give us write access and instead had a new technical documentation team doing it except they were just uploading Word docs to Confluence. We couldn't search for anything in the docs but even searching for article titles failed so we a…
> We couldn't search for anything in the docs but even searching for article titles failed so we all just had to keep bookmarks to what we needed.
My experience with _every_ knowledge base has been that this is the solution. My current team has confluence pages pinned to slack channels which link to the other necessary pages.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with you. I’ve literally searched for page titles and had confluence tell me there’s no results found. I’ve found this problem exists (even though it’s worse with confluence) no matter what you use, and the solution is a better hierarchy
I cannot for a minute believe that search over a few hundreds/thousands of documents is anything less than a solved problem these days. Confluence is another level of bad, but I'm sure some software does search well.
I agree. If google can index the entire internet, there's no reason confluence can't index 10 pages by title in the length of time it takes to use the search.
But, my experience is that even when search is good, you need the right query. Take onboarding instructions. Do you search for "new hire", "initial setup", "setup guide", "engineering onboarding", "programmer first steps"?
Or, do you send a link in a welcome email to the right page, and have it pinned on the home page of your project?
Honestly, I think confluence would be better _without_ search.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#77I'm kinda sad that there doesn't seem to be a thing that is basically Wikipedia-like but with Google Docs-like shared editing as a "canonical" open source offering in this space. Notion is too much stuff! Basically want Confluence but faster.
In my "one day projects" file is essentially this. Adding CloudFlare durable objects as a proxy in front of Dokuwiki's API to make editing realtime collaborative.
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. MediaWiki is a solid solution and is very easy to setup. You can one-click deploy on DigitalOcean for $10/month and just enable daily snapshots. You can even use a managed DB if you want.
You can one-click deploy on DigitalOcean for $10/month Am I the only person left who simply has a web server? Untar Mediawiki, edit a few config variables, run an established database script, and off you go. Maybe I'm wildly out of touch, but I don't see why everything has to be a container or a monthly paid service around here. I get it for something like an email server, where misconfiguration could lead to your se…
and subscribe to yet another security announce email, i hope
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outline maintainer here, happy to see the rec and can answer any questions
Outline looks great. Thanks for creating it. Few questions: 1. Does it support rendering OpenAPI json/yaml? 2. Also it seems like it supports Draw.io via public URL. That's a no go. Can it support draw.io diagrams via attachments? 3. Google drive support is nice. Do you plan on supporting OneDrive as well?
1. No plans, that's an entirely different thing – check out https://scalar.com
2/3. Not currently but anyone could add support for such things
Re: How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot for a minute believe that search over a few hundreds/thousands of documents is anything less than a solved problem these days. Confluence is another level of bad, but I'm sure some software does search well.
I agree. If google can index the entire internet, there's no reason confluence can't index 10 pages by title in the length of time it takes to use the search. But, my experience is that even when search is good, you need the right query. Take onboarding instructions. Do you search for "new hire", "initial setup", "setup guide", "engineering onboarding", "programmer first steps"? Or, do you send a link in a welcome em…
I don't always want to find a page in response to something else. If I'm looking for a decision document I wrote a year ago, how am I going to do that without search?