Best Self-Hosted Alternatives to Confluence
Confluence is the default wiki for teams already living in Jira — spaces, page trees, and a per-user subscription that starts small and scales with every seat you add. What sends teams looking elsewhere is rarely the editor; it is paying per reader for documentation, and keeping the company's knowledge on a vendor's servers. The self-hosted wikis below cover the same job — spaces or shelves, rich editing, search, permissions — on one box you size once.
Confluence costs about $65/year and keeps your data on its servers. These researched, open-source alternatives give you the same workflow on hardware you own — here's what each needs to run.
- The closest shape to Confluence itself
- Docmost — spaces, real-time co-editing, comments, page history and built-in diagrams under an AGPL-3.0 core — with Bases, SSO, AI and audit logs sold as Business/Enterprise licenses.
- Documentation a non-technical team will actually keep
- BookStack — shelves, books and pages in a simple MIT-licensed PHP app on 512 MB — the smallest honest replacement for a team space.
- Markdown-first docs with the widest module set
- Wiki.js — Markdown, visual and HTML editors, the project's own image, and switchable modules for auth, rendering, search and storage — bring your own PostgreSQL and a dedicated sub-domain.
- The slickest editor, on a source-available license
- Outline — a polished real-time knowledge base that feels most like the SaaS it replaces — heavier to run, needs an external auth provider, and licensed BSL-1.1.
- A public, encyclopedia-scale knowledge base
- MediaWiki — the engine behind Wikipedia — wikitext, categories and templates for large public wikis; the least turnkey install here, with no upstream-recommended production image.
- A wiki with nothing else to run
- DokuWiki — one container from the project's official image, pages stored as plain text files, no database — the low-maintenance pick for a homelab or a small team.
The alternatives
What you give up by leaving Confluence
Leaving Confluence means giving up its native Jira integration, the Atlassian Marketplace of vetted apps, and a managed service with uptime and backups you never think about. The alternatives split by shape: Docmost and Outline reproduce the modern real-time editor; BookStack and Wiki.js are structured documentation wikis; MediaWiki and DokuWiki are classic wiki engines. None replicate the Jira link, and SSO — which Atlassian itself sells as a separate Guard add-on on most Confluence plans — is a paid tier in some of these too even when self-hosted, so check each app's caveats before you assume the whole bill disappears.
Paid link — we earn a commission if you shop through it.
Head-to-head
A real-time Notion-style wiki with a paid ring vs. the simplest fully free docs wiki.
Two Notion-style real-time wikis on the same stack — an AGPL core with a paid ring vs. a source-available whole.
Simple and truly open vs. slick and real-time.
Common questions
Are these Confluence alternatives really free?
The software is open-source and free to run. Your only cost is the server it runs on — often a few dollars a month, less than most SaaS subscriptions.
How much server do I need to self-host one?
Most of these run comfortably on a small VPS — 1–2 GB of RAM is enough for a single-user or small-team setup. Each app's page lists its minimum RAM.
Will I lose features by leaving Confluence?
It depends on the app. The alternatives below cover the core workflow; polish and integrations vary, so check each one's stack and difficulty before you commit.