All 100 ideasNotes
#71 of 100 · Notes
Confluence without the pain
A fast, self-hostable team wiki with in-place real-time editing, Markdown or file storage and search, replacing slow Confluence.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private33%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted33%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 12 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for14 Show HN launches do this job, and 12 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence2022 · 562 pts
- I am building an open-source Confluence and Notion alternative2024 · 551 pts
- OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion2026 · 381 pts
- A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)2026 · 260 pts
- Archivy – Self-hosted knowledge base embedded into your filesystem2020 · 219 pts
- Archivy – Extensible Self Hosted Knowledge Base – v1 Release2021 · 184 pts
- Internal wiki with diagrams for software and product teams2017 · 15 pts
- Matterwiki, a simple, beautiful, and open source wiki for teams2017 · 9 pts
Instead of: Confluence, Notion
The idea, as matched
A self-hostable team wiki or knowledge base (Confluence alternative) with in-place real-time editing, Markdown or Git-backed files and good search for internal documentation.
Jev first matched 21 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 12 of 21.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Spikes after Atlassian dropped server licences.
- Aug 2026Wants alternatives to Confluence and Jira, considering Notion and Linear. Read it: a comment in “Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls”
- Feb 2025Wants a self-hostable Nextcloud-like tool for collaborative Markdown editing. Read it: a comment in “If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown”
- Jul 2023Wants a self-hosted, file-based tool bridging note-taking, wikis and collaborative documents, with polished design and real-time editing. Read it: a comment in “Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off”
- Jan 2023Seeks a Confluence on-premise replacement and wonders about self-hosted MediaWiki. Read it: a comment in “Confluence on-premise is dead, what now?”
- Dec 2021Wants an easy-to-edit, versioned, themeable documentation tool for a small non-technical team's client-facing guides. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What are you using for non-tech, team documentation?”
- Sep 2021Wants advice on internal wiki platforms for company policies and procedures as a growing startup. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Preferred Internal Wiki Platform?”
- Oct 2020Wants a self-hosted wiki with modern looks and real-time collaborative editing like Confluence. Read it: a comment in “Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses”
- May 2020Wants a fast, Markdown-friendly document tool with command-line posting, replacing Confluence. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Workflow and Document Management Recomendations?”
- Aug 2019Wants a team knowledge base that is less clumsy than GitHub wiki, with in-place editing. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Where do you keep your Knowledge Base?”
- Jan 2019Wants a Confluence alternative that is faster, with proper Markdown, better organization and working search. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Any good Confluence alternatives out there?”
- Dec 2018Wants a modeless wiki with edit-in-place instead of separate read and edit modes. Read it: a comment in “Etsy’s experiment with immutable documentation”
- Aug 2017Wants tools to share documentation across a team of 30 engineers and organize customer inquiries. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Any recommendations for sharing project information between teams?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.