Best Confluence Alternatives in 2025: Review and Comparison
Atlassian Confluence is one of the oldest corporate wiki platforms and software documentation tools on the market. It's highly customizable and versatile wiki software that has accumulated a lot of features over the years. Its powerful enterprise capabilities and extensive configuration options helped it amass over 60,000 customers.
But it is not without its drawbacks, for example:
The learning curve can be quite steep for new users.
The editing experience can be slow and complex.
The search feature doesn’t always live up to expectations.
More and more teams find Confluence too overengineered and slow to be used effectively, leading to out-of-date content and low engagement:
"Confluence is not easy to use. All the places where I've used it, the information hasn't been up-to-date and people have preferred to work in some other tool before transferring info to Confluence. The last step is usually forgotten."
— Paul T., CTO (Capterra)
Does your Confluence analytics dashboard show that your team isn't updating your wiki? Are new team members struggling to get the hang of it? It might be time to switch to a more user-friendly alternative to Confluence – fortunately, there are many great options to choose from.
Top 10 Confluence alternatives
To make your decision easier, we've put together a list of 10 best Confluence alternatives and competitors, based on real reviews.
Confluence is a multifunctional product with a variety of use cases and applications – so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each one of these options comes with its own unique strengths, design decisions, and feature sets.
Check out the Confluence alternatives below and find the one that best suits your team's needs.
1. Nuclino
Nuclino is an internal knowledge base and wiki software that allows teams to organize information and collaborate in real time. Its clean, distraction-free interface, intuitive navigation, and frictionless editing experience make it stand out as a modern and easy-to-use alternative to Confluence.
While not as feature-packed as Confluence, Nuclino focuses on the essential functionality, such as search, content organization, and collaborative editing, and minimizes the learning curve for new users. It's a great option for teams looking for a faster, easier, and more lightweight Confluence alternative.
One of Nuclino's distinctive strengths is the effortless collaboration experience, which allows users to easily edit documents in real time and exchange feedback without stepping on each other's toes.
In addition to being able to organize their internal documentation in a familiar nested list, users can visualize their data in a Kanban board, a table, or a mindmap-style graph. This makes Nuclino a great solution for a wide range of use cases, including knowledge sharing, employee handbooks, employee onboarding and offboarding, sprint planning, process documentation, and many more.
You can also turn any Nuclino workspace into a public website, accessible to anyone on the web and discoverable via search engines. It's perfect for help centers, user documentation, changelogs, and much more.
Nuclino comes with an AI-powered assistant Sidekick. It can instantly answer any question based on your content, brainstorm ideas, create first drafts, generate images, summarize long documents, and more.
Nuclino also offers built-in visual collaboration and allows you to add an infinite collaborative canvas to any page. You can use it to create diagrams and flowcharts, organize ideas using sticky notes, build moodboards, and much more.
What makes Nuclino a great alternative to Confluence:
Seamless collaboration experience with real-time editing, comments, and mentions.
No learning curve, even non-technical users can easily set up and use Nuclino.
Clean, uncluttered interface and intuitive navigation.
Every interaction is optimized for speed: no page loads, instant search, real-time sync, Markdown commands, and shortcuts.
Notable features:
List, board, table, and graph views.
Real-time collaboration.
Internal links.
Version history.
Permissions and access rights management.
Comments and mentions.
Embeds & integrations with 50+ different apps.
Learn more about how Nuclino compares to Confluence: Nuclino vs Confluence.
What users say about Nuclino:
"Nuclino is what Confluence should be. Great from start to end. I signed up with Nuclino in its very early days and the product has been rock solid. The team has been willing to add new features I've suggested (yay, emoji auto-complete when entering ":") and they've been moving fast and building new features every month."
— Ian M. (Capterra)
2. Quip
Quip is a project management and task collaboration software that combines documents, spreadsheets, checklists, presentation slides, and chat in one tool. Tightly integrated with Salesforce, Quip is a great Confluence alternative for large teams and enterprises.
Adopting Quip will likely come with a certain learning curve, so make sure to allocate enough time to thoroughly evaluate it together with your entire team to make sure everyone can get the hang of it.
While Quip is more expensive than most other alternatives, it can replace not only Confluence but also Google Drive, Slack, and other online collaboration tools, saving costs in the long run.
What users say about Quip:
"Quip has managed to stand out in this heavily competitive field of online collaboration. Quip UI is really smooth and feels new! Perhaps one point was, it takes significant time for a new guy to get up to speed with the tool and understand all the intricate details."
— Verified Reviewer (Capterra)
3. You Need A Wiki
You Need a Wiki is new to the market of wiki software. If your team enjoys the effortless collaboration experience and familiar feel of Google Docs, this tool might be right for you. With YNAW, you can take your existing disconnected Google Docs and build a wiki out of them in a matter of seconds.
For those who find Confluence too bloated and don't need any of its advanced customization options and enterprise-level features, YNAW is an alternative worth considering.
It is still in the early stages of development and new product updates are being rolled out on a regular basis.
What users say about You Need A Wiki:
"This might be the best tool to explore Google Drive. Simple and fast to implement, feature enhancements are daily, brings clarity to the entire organization. Contains some of the same shortcomings of G Suite."
— Dion E. (Product Hunt)
4. SharePoint
SharePoint is an immensely popular intranet portal, used by 190 million people across 200,000 organizations. It's a tool many love to hate, but this list of Confluence alternatives would be incomplete without it.
SharePoint comes for free with any Microsoft Office 365 subscription, making it a cost-effective option for any organization already powered by Microsoft. It also seamlessly integrates with other products in the Microsoft suite, most notably OneDrive, making it easy to keep all your work in sync.
It's a very powerful and versatile platform. SharePoint offers even more flexibility and configuration options than Confluence, allowing you to customize it on a granular level. On the other hand, its extensive feature set comes at a price of a fairly high learning curve and a cluttered, complex interface. New users will likely be overwhelmed by all the available settings and menus and will need dedicated training to get the hang of the platform.
Whether SharePoint would be a good solution to replace Confluence depends on your internal workflows and preferences. Large enterprises may appreciate the flexibility of SharePoint, while smaller teams may prefer a more lightweight and user-friendly alternative.
Looking for more tools similar to SharePoint? Check out this list of SharePoint alternatives.
What users say about SharePoint:
"I like the ability to quickly share, access, and retrieve documents that my team and I use on a weekly basis. It's nice having one place where everything is stored, and that I don't have to go to multiple storage locations to get what I need. The versatility of Sharepoint is also a bright spot."
— Brandon G. (Capterra)
5. Zoho Wiki
Zoho Wiki is an enterprise wiki tool that is offered as a part of Zoho Office Suite and integrates well with other Zoho Products, such as Zoho Analytics and Zoho Projects. While its feature count is not as extensive as that of Confluence, it covers all the essentials, including a powerful WYSIWYG editor, advanced access management, custom branding, and more.
Zoho Wiki is available for free for teams with up to 3 members and offers a very affordable Business subscription plan for just €2.70 per user per month. It's best-suited for small teams, educators, and anyone who is working with a limited budget.
What users say about Zoho Wiki:
"Zoho Wiki is a great software for knowledge management and collaborating with globally located teams on certain projects. It has a well-designed feed, and strong access controls. This gives me master access to all the materials I need, with a good customizable layout too."
— Carly A. (G2)
6. Basecamp
Like Quip, Basecamp is an all-in-one remote collaboration tool. It brings together message boards, tasks, documents, files, calendars, and more. It can replace Confluence, Google Drive, Slack, and many other tools, serving as your team's central collaboration hub.
Basecamp particularly shines as a tool for remote companies. The Basecamp team was one of the pioneers of remote work and incorporated their personal experiences and learnings into the design of their product.
If you are managing a virtual team and like the idea of consolidating all work in one place and reducing the number of tools you use – Basecamp can be a great option for you.
Looking for more tools similar to Basecamp? Check out this list of Basecamp alternatives.
What users say about Basecamp:
"I've personally used Basecamp for two years and have liked it in general for organizing Digital Marketing projects within an agency. Like any software with vast functionality, you have to learn all of its features to use it as it is intended to be used."
— Stanislav G. (Capterra)
7. BookStack
BookStack stands out as one of the few open-source and self-hosted Confluence alternatives that is also fairly user-friendly. The initial installation may require some patience and technical skills, but once your wiki is up and running, it should be easy to bring new users on board.
The tool also offers a clean, intuitive interface and a wide range of customization options. If you are looking for a self-hosted free Confluence alternative, consider BookStack.
Looking for more tools similar to BookStack? Check out this list of BookStack alternatives.
What users say about BookStack:
"The stock interface design has a modern feel and is simple for new users to use. Granular permissions can be set up for specific roles on a per-content basis and permissions will waterfall down to child content. However, the current installation process involves many steps and may be a lot to take in for people not familiar with setting up Laravel applications."
— Dan B. (Slant)
8. GitBook
GitBook is an all-in-one documentation platform that works as your internal wiki, a knowledge base for your customers, and your personal note-taking app.
While it lacks certain collaboration features, such as real-time collaborative editing, it performs strongly in other areas. If you are looking for a tool to consolidate all your static documentation in one place, GitBook can be a great choice.
Looking for more tools similar to GitBook? Check out this list of GitBook alternatives.
What users say about GitBook:
"Before Gitbook our documentation was limited and very hard to find. It is really easy to get started with and the best part is that it supports Markdown. Writing documentation in Markdown is way easier and Gitbook makes it easy to organize the content. There are no cons as such but there were few issues while getting started, while importing the existing documentation for the first time."
— Vedarth K. (Capterra)
9. Wiki.js
Wiki.js is a powerful open-source wiki software built on Node.js. Popular among developers, Wiki.js saves all content directly as Markdown (.md) files and syncs with your remote Git repository. With a modern and elegant interface, it's a great platform for both internal and external documentation.
If you are a team of developers looking to replace Confluence with a high-performance, self-hosted alternative, give Wiki.js a try.
10. Papyrs
Papyrs may not be the most powerful and feature-packed tool on this list, but it is one of the most user-friendly ones. It was designed to be a more lightweight and modern alternative to tools like Confluence and SharePoint.
Papyrs is a fairly general-purpose tool that allows you to set up your internal or external wiki, create an intranet portal for your employees, collaborate on projects, or even build a product knowledge base for your customers. Its feature set includes a drag-and-drop page editor, powerful search, version history, user permissions, comments, and more.
The pricing model of Papyrs is tiered. Its cheapest plan starts at $89 per month, making it a fairly expensive option if you are a small team. Large companies, however, can take advantage of the "Company Intranet" plan that charges a flat $899 fee per month, regardless of how many users you add.
What users say about Papyrs:
"Creating a wiki site was super easy with this intuitive program. Although for our needs some of the features are a bit too rich, the overall product is much more user-friendly than our last intranet site, and it's much more appealing to our company users as well."
— Maura V. (Capterra)
Find the right Confluence alternative for your team
There is a reason why so many new Confluence alternatives are springing up every year. Confluence tries to do many things, but ultimately doesn't truly excel at any of them.
While choosing between all these options may seem overwhelming at first, it's an opportunity to find a solution that better matches your team's unique needs. We hope this list has made the decision a little easier.
Ready to get started?
