Alternatives to Notion and Confluence

At a glance

Open-source alternatives to Notion and Confluence compared
Tool	Licence	Self-hosting difficulty	Who it suits	Strengths
BookStack	MIT	Easy to moderate: PHP and MySQL, with install scripts for Ubuntu. Not for shared hosting	Teams who want one tidy place for processes, guides and how-tos	Simple books, chapters and pages structure, visual and Markdown editors, roles, single sign-on and two-step login, all free
Docmost	AGPL-3.0	Moderate: Docker, with PostgreSQL and Redis in the standard setup	Teams leaving Notion or Confluence who want live co-editing	Real-time collaboration, spaces, comments, search, built-in diagrams, imports from Notion, Word, Markdown and HTML

BookStack: MIT. Licence checked 31 October 2026.
Docmost: AGPL-3.0. Enterprise features are under a separate paid licence, in their own folders of the code. Licence checked 31 October 2026.

Most companies have the same problem: the knowledge is in someone's head, or in a Word document nobody can find. So they buy Notion or Confluence, and then it quietly turns into a monthly bill per person, including for all the people who only read the thing.

Notion Plus is £8.50 per member a month on its UK pricing page. For 10 people, that's about £1,020 a year. Confluence is free for up to 10 users, which is great, but after that Standard is $7.15 per user a month for the first 100 users, about £5.42. So 15 people pay around £975 a year.

Those aren't scary numbers. But a wiki doesn't need much, and it's one of the simplest things to host yourself.

A quick note: I'd originally planned to cover AppFlowy here. It used to be a popular open-source Notion alternative, but its server is now a closed-source commercial product, and self-hosting is free for one seat only, so it's not what it was. Docmost has taken its place.

BookStack

BookStack is a simple, self-hosted wiki, and I like how plain it is. Everything sits in a structure anyone can follow: books, chapters and pages. There's no working out how someone else organised their database of databases.

A clear structure. Books hold chapters and chapters hold pages, and you can sort across books.
A visual editor, with an optional Markdown editor for those who prefer it.
Built-in diagrams through diagrams.net.
Search across everything, and links to any paragraph.
Page revisions and image management.
Roles and permissions to lock down what people can see and do.
Single sign-on, free. OIDC, SAML2 and LDAP, plus social logins.
Two-step login, free, and you can enforce it by role.

That last pair is a big deal. Lots of tools keep those behind a paid plan, and BookStack doesn't. In fact there's no paid plan at all. It's MIT licensed.

It's built on PHP and Laravel, with MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.6 or later, and needs PHP 8.2 or higher. There are install scripts for fresh Ubuntu servers, and they make setup reasonably simple. Shared hosting isn't supported, so you'll want a small server of your own.

The catch is that it's a wiki, and only a wiki. There are no Notion-style databases, boards or calendars, and no live editing together in the same page. If your Notion is really a project tracker, this won't replace it. It's also worth knowing that BookStack has no automatic route from Confluence, although community scripts and its API can help.

Docmost

Docmost is newer and feels more like the tools you're leaving. It's described by its makers as an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion, and it's a popular project with over 20,000 stars on GitHub.

Real-time collaboration, so several people can edit a page at once.
Spaces, groups and permissions, like Confluence.
Comments and search.
Diagrams with Draw.io, Excalidraw and Mermaid.
Embeds from tools such as Airtable, Loom and Miro.
Import from Notion, Word, Markdown and HTML. You export a ZIP from Notion and upload it.
Export to Markdown or HTML, for a page or a whole space.

Here's the catch, and it's a fair-sized one. Docmost's core is AGPL-3.0, but a lot of what businesses want is on the Business plan at $6 per seat a month, billed annually, with a 10-seat minimum. Single sign-on, two-step login, page-level permissions and the Confluence importer are all paid. That's $720 a year at minimum, about £545.

It runs in Docker, with PostgreSQL and Redis in the standard setup. Docmost's docs don't give a memory figure, and you'll need your reverse proxy to allow WebSockets, because the live editor depends on them.

Which one?

My pick is BookStack. For a staff handbook, processes and how-tos, its simple structure is a strength, and you get proper login security without paying.

Main drawback: no live co-editing and no Notion-style databases.
Docmost instead if your team writes together, or you're coming from Notion and want it to feel familiar. Budget for the paid plan if you want two-step login.
Stay on Confluence if you're at 10 users or fewer and happy. It's free, and that's hard to beat.

What it costs

Notion and Confluence

Notion Plus: £8.50 per user a month. Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Confluence Free (up to 10 users): Free. Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Confluence Standard (1 to 100 users): £5.42 per user a month (converted from $7.15 at the European Central Bank reference rate on 2 October 2026). Checked 31 October 2026 (source).

Self-hosted, run for you

No per-user fees. Adding people doesn't add licence costs.
Setup: a one-off fee to set it up and move your data across.
Hosting and care: a fixed monthly fee covering every app on your server.
I'll quote once I know what you need.

Paid tool prices exclude VAT unless stated.

The UK angle

A wiki doesn't usually need a UK server, and a US-hosted tool is fine for most small firms. Atlassian offers UK data residency on Confluence Standard and above, using its London region. Notion's EU data residency is for Enterprise customers, and other workspaces are hosted in the US.

It's more of a question if your wiki holds staff details, client records or security information such as how your systems are set up. Plenty do, often by accident. If yours does, keeping it on a server you control is a tidy answer, as long as someone looks after security and updates properly.

Ownership counts too. A company wiki gets more valuable every year, and both tools here keep it in a normal database that you own.

Honest drawbacks

Neither replaces all of Notion. Its databases and all-in-one flexibility are the bit that's hardest to match.
Moving takes some work. Docmost imports from Notion. Its Confluence importer is paid, and BookStack has no official importer for either.
BookStack has no live co-editing. Two people working on one page have to take turns.
Docmost's free edition lacks login security features that most firms would want.
Notion's AI and integrations are hard to match. You'll give up templates and ready-made connections.
Someone has to run it, and a wiki everyone relies on needs backups.

Need it connected to your systems?

BookStack is built on Laravel, so custom features and integrations are very doable, and the team at Dev Partners can help build or customise them.

Open-source alternatives to Notion and Confluence