Confluence vs Outline
Confluence and Outline are both wiki and knowledge base software. Confluence is a commercial product from Atlassian. Outline is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 41k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Confluence when
- Your teams already use Jira and need a shared documentation space that links to tickets.
- Pick Outline when
- Your team wants a fast Notion- or Confluence-style wiki that you can either buy as a hosted service or run on your own server.
Side by side
A team wiki with pages, spaces, templates and comments, tightly linked to Jira.
A team knowledge base with real-time collaborative Markdown editing, collections, search, permissions and Slack integration.
Content sprawls and search is weak without curation, and Atlassian has ended server licences, pushing you to cloud or costly Data Center.
It uses the Business Source License rather than an OSI licence, and self-hosting needs PostgreSQL, Redis, file storage and an external SSO provider for login.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service and self-hosted server
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
TypeScript, React, Node.js, Koa, PostgreSQL and Redis
Closed source, sold by Atlassian
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
919 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
41k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v1.12.0.
Other comparisons
More wiki and knowledge base software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.