How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup

As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups. (Or Github Wiki if you can stomach it). It's free to start, and you get 10 users. By the time you have 10 people who need access, (and you can export PDF's of pages if you have one off sharing to do) you pay $50/mo. If you have 10 employees $50/mo is pocket lint.

My problem with Confluence is that I want a wiki primarily to be able to find information, and secondarily to store information, and I can never find anything in Confluence. The search function seems to be optimized for maximum frustration.

Agreed. Overall I find Confluence an anti-pattern and just obnoxious.

I completely agree with you. I’ve literally searched for page titles and had confluence tell me there’s no results found.

I’ve found this problem exists (even though it’s worse with confluence) no matter what you use, and the solution is a better hierarchy

I cannot for a minute believe that search over a few hundreds/thousands of documents is anything less than a solved problem these days. Confluence is another level of bad, but I'm sure some software does search well.

That's really surprising. Any idea if it was Confluence self-hosted vs cloud?

We have a pretty substantial Confluence Cloud and don't see the "search doesn't work" problem. Tangent: we have people who browse, and people who search, and ne'er the twain shall meet, but that's a different problem in page structure, conventions, tags, whatever.

> As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups

Confluence is so bad it reminds of that meme: "I expected nothing and I am still dissapointed".

It's so bad I would be happy to use github wiki over it, even if my employer wasn't using github for version control.

I'm rather curious what you would put as worse options, because Confidence is by far the worst wiki I've ever touched. After well over 20 years of touching various wikis, professionally and out of curiosity... but they're not really a passion of mine so I suppose that isn't saying all that much.

The only reason I would even remotely consider it is if I already had gigantic investment in Jira, and even then I'd strongly consider doing something else and writing up a small sync tool to keep task statuses updated.

It's Confluence cloud. I've looked for documents I myself have written, using the keywords I knew were in the title, and got irrelevant random pages. It's ridiculous.

This was my experience as well except even worse. When my employer was acquired by evil mega corp ISP, they took away our mediawiki and replaced it with confluence. But they also didn't give us write access and instead had a new technical documentation team doing it except they were just uploading Word docs to Confluence. We couldn't search for anything in the docs but even searching for article titles failed so we all just had to keep bookmarks to what we needed.

> I'm rather curious what you would put as worse options,

Anything that requires time or money for less than 10 people.

Notion has similar problems (search sucks, performance doesn't scale), but starts costing once there's more than one person. You go from £0 to £20/mo for two people, and the chances are that at two people you're on ramen money so you don't want to be spending on... anything. Mediawiki and co require a VPS and auth/vpn/management. That's a distraction you don't need for the first 6-12 months of working at a startup. If I as a startup CTO/founding engineer spend 2 hours setting up mediawiki to spend £60 in a year on, the payback vs confluence or github wiki (which is running in seconds and is free) is when you scale to 10 people. Move to something when you have an actual need for it. By the time you're spending $64/mo on confluence users (or £100/mo on notion - sorry for currency switch but confluences pricing is only in USD for me), you're spending 10x that on payroll _management_. It's just a nothingburger.

Github wiki is fine - the problem for me is that I work in teams and on products where a sizable amount of the team don't use github.

> We couldn't search for anything in the docs but even searching for article titles failed so we all just had to keep bookmarks to what we needed.

My experience with _every_ knowledge base has been that this is the solution. My current team has confluence pages pinned to slack channels which link to the other necessary pages.

I agree. If google can index the entire internet, there's no reason confluence can't index 10 pages by title in the length of time it takes to use the search.

But, my experience is that even when search is good, you need the right query. Take onboarding instructions. Do you search for "new hire", "initial setup", "setup guide", "engineering onboarding", "programmer first steps"?

Or, do you send a link in a welcome email to the right page, and have it pinned on the home page of your project?

Honestly, I think confluence would be better _without_ search.

I don't always want to find a page in response to something else. If I'm looking for a decision document I wrote a year ago, how am I going to do that without search?

> Mediawiki and co require a VPS and auth/vpn/management

There are companies that offer mediawiki as a SASS app. You can self-host if you want but you by no means have to.

I'd agree that most startups probably dont want to bother with doing their own setup as they have more important things to focus on.

[Disclaimer, im a mediawiki dev]

yea, hosted-mediawiki was my immediate thought. cheap or free, basically the same kind of permissions/etc as any other.

and 100% agreed, self-hosting is usually not a good choice for a small company, and cost is basically not an issue beyond ~10+.

Notion is an interesting one. I wouldn't personally call it a wiki, but I can kinda see why some would. but the performance and cost and and etc combined with feature-lock-in that Notion has would put it pretty far down the list for me too (though probably still well above confluence), and possibly completely rule it out (which confluence avoids).

Those hosted media wikis aren’t free though. That’s the big difference. Spending $60/year on media wiki hosting is an avoidable expense and confluence costs nothing until you have 10 people.

I’m not saying it’s 100% of startups, but unless you have a good reason not to, I think confluence is the right choice.

Do you really need a wiki if you have less than 10 people?