In Search of a Nice Team Wiki

Overview

This page is collaboratively owned; please add / edit sections to improve.

Pete is joining a new startup team who are very engaged in the team's business work, but who are not very technical.

What are some possible team wikis we might use? Key desired features: easy to use for non-technical folks, markdown support. Realtime collaborative editing a plus.

Pete started this page on 2024-10-26.

Outline

https://www.getoutline.com/

Ask Pete kaminski@istori.com for an invite to his test instance (through 2024-11-24).

Looks pretty nice, actually. They don't market themselves well, and their 30-day trial is difficult to set up (you need a business account on Google or Microsoft, or you can set up a Slack instance and sneak in that way). But that's a one-time setup thing. After 30 days, workspaces go read-only but export still works.

Open source and self-hostable, which is nice. (The startup would probably use hosted, though.)

The organization and editor look easy enough for non-technical folks, and is mostly powerful enough for Pete. Looks like they have nice embedding support, including Grist and Diagrams.net among many others.

Has realtime collaborative editing.

The wiki linking is a little wonky. You can do it, but only with Command-K, not double square brackets. If a destination page gets renamed, link text to that page doesn't change (and is not very easy to change by hand). I (Pete) am not crazy about how this works, but it might be fine for non-technical folks.

Affine

https://affine.pro/

Looks neat, but it's complicated.

Capacities

https://capacities.io/

Very nice Notion alternative. Single player only, though.

Google Docs

::rolls eyes::

Hedgedoc / HackMD

Great for single pages, wiki features are not robust enough.

Massive Wiki

https://massive.wiki/

Too free-form, no realtime collaborative editing, sync is either too technical (Git) or too brittle for multiple users (Obsidian Sync).

Otherwise, it's perfect. :-)

(Engineering will have one or more Massive Wikis, of course.)

Notion

https://notion.so/

The mainline alternative right now. Too complicated for Pete's taste.

Confluence

No thanks. Confluence is confusing and hard to use. (Not quite as bad as Jira, but don't get me started.)

Zoom Docs

Suprisingly fast and good, give it a try @pete

Other Disqualified Candidates

• wiki.js - it's cute, but too old school (despite the modernity of the implementation)
• https://decko.org/ (formerly Wagn) - neat vision, still under development
• TeamBrain - not beginner-friendly, too network-oriented, not page-oriented enough
• MediaWiki - respectable old-school wiki, great for a large-scale encyclopedia, but clunky for a team wiki