Ask HN: Modern, ideally hosted wiki engine for small-ish community? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Modern, ideally hosted wiki engine for small-ish community?

14 pointslambdadmitry9 comments

Apparently it's hard to find a software for a small community's knowledge database. I guess wiki-like engine is ideal, but which one? Confluence is very complex and enterprise-oriented, wikia is all ads and doesn't have any access control as far as I know. Everything else I found is either expensive or abandoned. What would you use to host common knowledge of a small community (think sports club)?

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Confluence isn't complex at all. My company has an antiquated piece-of-shit knowledge system that's been doing nothing but causing headaches and issues for the last 5 years. The company wouldn't let us investigate a new system, so I just setup Confluence on a VM and moved about 600 articles to it in a week, manually. I then just released it on the trial and everyone immediately abandoned the old one, forcing the company to pay for it - forgiveness is easier than permission etc.

Anyway, if you think Confluence is complex, that just means you haven't tried it yet, or you spent too long looking at the admin panel options. Cars are complicated if you start doing gearbox changes, but if you're just sat driving then it's a piece of cake.

I tried tons of software for this before I settled on Confluence, tbh nothing came close.

Wikimatrix.org provides a comparison of solutions. Here are hosted solutions that support wysiwyg, your own domain and custom branding (minus Wikia):

https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/BrainKeeper%2BCentralDesk...

Use the wizard to narrow down choices.

These options look like the highlights to me:

Zoho Wiki: https://www.zoho.eu/wiki/pricing.html

PBwiki: https://www.pbworks.com/wikis.html

I really like notion.so

It's clean and fully featured and, for the price, might be just what you're looking for.

Notion.so is my favourite piece of software, and has fantastic support.

We use mediawiki. Not perfect but does the job.

- https://www.mediawiki.org

Also, two alternatives that I wanted to test but never had the time to:

- https://www.bookstackapp.com/

- https://wiki.js.org/

Confluence isn't particularly complex, but its per-seat licensing model can get expensive pretty quickly. Operationally, though, it's very much a 'fire and forget' kind of thing: other than applying regular updates to it, I don't have to touch our internal Confluence setup for work much at all. On the other hand, that installation is $2800 to start for a self-hosted instance with 50 users, so it ain't a cheap option if you have more than 10 users.

For a group without a budget, I'd lean more towards Dokuwiki or Mediawiki, both of which are still fairly easy to administer and feature-rich.

You could get a cloudhosted 10 user XWiki service for 10€/month. I run a copy locally on my laptop for all my technical notes. It’s described as Enterprise but it’s really easy to use, or I wouldn’t use it just for taking notes.

https://www.xwiki.com/en/products/pricing

We recently switched to google sites. It’s simplicity was a sore point for me at first. But now I like it. Having only a few features has forced us to keep things simple. This enables our non-tech team to use it better and contribute too. I think ease of content maintenance is a HUGE value.

Try Colab: https://kolabenterprise.com/explore/business as it is free software.

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