Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative.
Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role.
But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a real Confluence alternative
> Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative.
Sure, but there are a lot of people within that range up to tens of thousands. I have had some people mention using BookStack within environments towards to tens of thousands (Although it's likely a lesser portion enganged). Just because it may not achieve that one factor does not discount it as an alternative for significant audience.
> Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role.
Yeah, we don't have the word usage of "Teams" but I'm not sure what that'd offer in addition to roles. Role specific permissions can be applied to any of the hierarchy elements (Including upon page content).
I'm certainly not criticizing BookStack. It actually looks super responsive and have a great set of features to manage knowledge especially for an open source platform.
As for roles. In organizations of a certain size, the concept of role is not organization wide, but team-wide. You will set for example the editor role, for some people of the team "Operations". Don't really see how this can be done on BookStack
Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways. To be frank, it's the worst company documentation software I've ever used. Discoverability is terrible and it's easy to end up in a situation with thousands of pages that quickly fall out of maintenance because features for organization are an after thought. Its own markup is terrible and its Markdown import support similarly so.
Most wikis are terrible at evergreen notes: the only one I can think of that might be moving the ball forward is Athens Research though I wasn't able to get their self-hosted beta running and I host dozens of other services with Compose.
Obsidian might be good too, but they don't seem too keen on supporting large business collab usecases even though enterprise is a cashcow.
> Confluence is terrible in all kinds of other ways.
I disagree, Confluence is used by tens of thousands of organizations and they don't have a very good Sales strategy, that means a lot of business choose them when they could have choose something else. So I can't buy that it is terrible everywhere.
Can we do better ? Hell yeah. But I agree with you that most of Confluence competitors are in the SMB space even though money is in large enterprise. (But that's why we are building Dokkument)
That's not wikis that are bad at evergreen notes, that's evergreen notes that are not suitable for sharing with teams. Athens or Roam research, or others works well for one person, but can't work for teams.
> Confluence is used by tens of thousands of organizations and they don't have a very good Sales strategy, that means a lot of business choose them when they could have choose something else. So I can't buy that it is terrible everywhere.
I don't believe the number of users in an enterprise segment buying into a software is at all indicative of the usefulness of a piece of software. Atlassian products are typically sold between people who will not be the primary users of that software.
I have yet to see a SWE missing or desiring an Atlassian product. GitHub and other SaaS products yes but never Atlassian.
I also disagree that evergreen notes aren't suitable for teams. Notes that receive a lot of attention, or are high touch, are by definition evergreen. We need more of these in orgs but most of us don't know how to tend to our companies digital gardens. A huge part of it is wordly digital cruft akin to technical debt that accrues. As it grows in size it compounds the problem of discoverability.
Note-taking is a skill that receives precious little attention, despite being so critical to knowledge work AKA anything SWEs work with daily.
At the end of the day, people need to be able to discover notes if you want these to be useful. Just talking about evergreen notes without offering a way to discover those notes by anyone is useless.
Here's where we agree! I'd love better discoverability built in to these products. It'd be a huge boon, personally, at my workplace (that uses Confluence :-().
That's where Roam Research has a point. Creating a graph is appealing, as it is easier to browse and so discover things. That's also how Wikipedia works. But Wikipedia would never have worked without Google.
In organizations the best thing to do imo is to have everyone follow the same rules. Even bad rules that everyone follow is better than everyone following its own rules. And that's clearly one thing that Confluence sucks at. But the rules can't either be the same for anyone anywhere, so there is some balance to find. The other area that can help discoverability is curation
I would be happy to have a chat with you, don't hesitate to reach out to paul at dokkument com
Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role.
But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a real Confluence alternative