Open source alternatives to Confluence

What Confluence does

Confluence is a workspace for team documentation: knowledge bases, product requirements, meeting notes and project pages, organized into spaces with templates and comments. Alongside pages it now offers live docs, whiteboards and databases, and Atlassian’s Rovo AI adds search, summaries and agents. It is closely tied to Jira and integrates with many other tools. Atlassian sells it mainly as a cloud service, with a Free plan for up to 10 users and 2 GB of storage.

Why people look for an alternative

• The end of self-managed Confluence. Atlassian ended support for all Server products on 15 February 2024. For Data Center, new customers could no longer buy subscriptions from 30 March 2026, and Confluence Data Center reaches end of life on 28 March 2029, when subscriptions expire and instances become read-only. Organizations that must keep documentation on their own infrastructure, for policy or regulatory reasons, will need another product.
• Free plan limits. The Free plan stops at 10 users and 2 GB of storage, so most organizations need a paid subscription.
• A cloud-only future. Atlassian’s end-of-life plan points Data Center customers to its cloud platform, so staying with Confluence means hosting documentation with Atlassian, and Rovo AI features are part of that cloud offering.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Migration. XWiki SAS offers a Confluence migration toolkit and service; Docmost has a Confluence importer, but only in its paid Business edition. For the others, plan on moving content by export and import.
2. Sign-in and permissions. BookStack and Wiki.js include LDAP, SAML and OIDC in the free software, and BookStack adds per-role MFA. Docmost keeps SSO and MFA for paid editions. XWiki supports LDAP and other authenticators through extensions and has the most fine-grained rights.
3. Real-time co-editing. Docmost and XWiki edit pages together in real time; BookStack and Wiki.js do not.
4. Structure. BookStack uses shelves, books, chapters and pages; Docmost uses spaces; XWiki supports page trees and separate sub-wikis.
5. Running it. BookStack runs on PHP and MySQL, Wiki.js on Node.js and PostgreSQL, Docmost on Node.js with PostgreSQL and Redis, and XWiki on Java with a servlet container, a database and Solr. Only XWiki has a hosted version from its developers.

Which one to choose

Docmost feels closest to modern Confluence, with spaces, real-time editing, comments and built-in diagrams, but SSO and its Confluence importer are paid. BookStack is the easiest for non-technical staff and includes SSO and MFA in its single MIT edition. Wiki.js suits technical teams that want many login options and pages synced to Git, keeping in mind that its 3.0 rewrite is still in beta. For large organizations that need sub-wikis, structured data, commercial support and a guided migration, XWiki is the most complete replacement. The notes and knowledge base guide covers the wider category.