Wiki.js vs Outline
Both are alternatives to Confluence. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Outline vs Wiki.js — same comparison, one verdict.
Wiki.js
Every editor, every auth provider, every storage backend.
Wiki.js is the flexible one: Markdown, WYSIWYG, HTML and AsciiDoc editors, more than fifty authentication providers, and content that can sync to Git so your wiki has real version history in a repository you control. AGPL-3.0, around 29k stars. That Git sync is the feature worth noticing — it makes documentation reviewable in pull requests, which is how engineering teams already work. The trade is configuration: it does a great deal, and it asks you to decide about most of it.
Outline
The best-looking option — and not open source, whatever the lists say.
Outline is a fast, beautifully judged team knowledge base with excellent search, a slash-command editor and Slack integration that people actually use. It is also the entry on this page most often mislabelled. Outline ships under the **Business Source License 1.1**, not an OSI licence: you may self-host it for internal use, but you may not offer it as a competing hosted service, and the licence converts to open source only after a delay. For most companies documenting their own work that changes nothing. If you were planning to build a product on it, it changes everything — and you would not learn that from the directory that told you it was open source.
Side by side
| Wiki.js | Outline | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 92 | 66 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Business Source License 1.1 (source-available, not OSI open source) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. You supply the server and database. | Self-hostable free within BUSL terms. Outline Cloud is paid per user. |
Wiki.js edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Wiki.js
Strengths
- +Git storage backend gives real version control over documentation
- +Over fifty auth providers — SSO into almost anything
- +Multiple editors, so writers are not forced into one style
- +Mature, with years of production use
Trade-offs
- −More configuration than BookStack before it feels finished
- −Node and a database to operate
- −Version 3 has been a long time coming
- −Search is adequate rather than excellent
Outline
Strengths
- +Best design and editing experience of anything on this page
- +Search is genuinely fast and good
- +Slack and API integrations that people use daily
- +Self-hostable for ordinary internal use
Trade-offs
- −NOT open source — Business Source License, despite near-universal mislabelling
- −Cannot be offered as a competing hosted service
- −Licence terms can be tightened by the vendor on future versions
- −Smaller plugin ecosystem than Confluence
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-03. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.