Outline is a relatively new wiki software that was launched in 2020. It's known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a popular choice for teams and organizations looking for a straightforward wiki platform. But it's not without its drawbacks, and there are many reasons why you may be searching for an Outline alternative.
Because Outline isn't as mature as some other wiki solutions, the overall user experience may not be as refined. Outline also has fewer integrations with third-party tools and services and doesn't offer a dedicated mobile application, making it harder to access it on the go.
Fortunately, there are many great Outline competitors to choose from.
To make your decision easier, we've put together a list of the 5 best Outline alternatives and competitors, based on real reviews.
Each of these solutions comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. The best choice depends on the reason you are unhappy with Outline: Are you looking for a more stable and polished tool? Do you need a solution that integrates with your other tools? Does your team need a more collaborative wiki?
Check out the Outline alternatives below and find the one that best suits your team's needs.
Nuclino offers a straightforward, user-friendly alternative to Outline. It provides the same essential features like hierarchical content organization, internal links, search, and more, all in a lightweight and fast package.The interface of Nuclino is clean and clutter-free, with no clunky menus to distract you from the content.
While Outline is close to a traditional wiki, with content curated by a few experts and remaining relatively static. In contrast, Nuclino encourages collaboration. Every page in Nuclino functions as a real-time document, allowing multiple team members to edit simultaneously without version conflicts. Comments and mentions make it easy to exchange feedback.
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.
But building an internal knowledge base or a public documentation site are just some of many things you can achieve with Nuclino. It's a unified team workspace and can be a great solution for a wide range of use cases, including sprint planning, document collaboration, project management, asynchronous communication, and more.
What users say about Nuclino:
"A positive experience from top to bottom. Nuclino is, first and foremost, EXTREMELY easy to use. The GUI is self-explanatory, with a clean and modern front end. It helped us to create a perfect knowledge base for our business."
Confluence is a well-established wiki and collaboration platform created by Atlassian. This Outline alternative has been around since 2003, making it a much more mature solution compared to Outline. It's used by a broad range of organizations, from small businesses to large enterprises, for creating, sharing, and collaborating on documentation.
Confluence offers a comprehensive set of features, including advanced content formatting, macros, and templates. It also seamlessly integrates with other Atlassian products, making it a popular choice for organizations already using Jira, Bitbucket, or Trello. It additionally integrates with a wide range of third-party apps and services.
Looking for more tools similar to Confluence? Check out this list of Confluence alternatives.
What users say about Confluence:
"Confluence has been such a flexible and powerful tool for my day-to-day work. It is effectively an enterprise-grade wiki that integrates very well with the Atlassian Suite of tools."
If you prefer Microsoft products, you may want to consider using SharePoint as an alternative to Outline. If your organization already uses Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) products like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Outlook, SharePoint seamlessly integrates with these tools. This makes it an obvious choice for businesses heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
SharePoint offers a comprehensive feature set, including document libraries, version control, workflow automation, and content management. It's designed to handle large-scale document repositories and can accommodate the needs of both small teams and enterprise-level organizations. If scalability is a concern, SharePoint has the advantage over Outline.
Looking for more tools similar to SharePoint? Check out this list of SharePoint alternatives.
What users say about SharePoint:
"SharePoint can do just about anything, from intranet, department organization, knowledge base, extranet access, project management, to SSRS reporting. It is one of the most capable products I've ever dealt with. Its strength is also its weakness, because it has so much functionality it isn't easy to master. If you want to fully use this software you need a dedicated Sharepoint administrator and an organization that is engaged in making it useful."
If you're seeking an Outline alternative with a more mature and feature-rich offering, Zoho Wiki is another compelling option.
Zoho Wiki is part of the Zoho suite of online productivity and collaboration tools. It was launched in 2007 and is a considerably more established solution compared to Outline. Zoho Wiki offers a robust set of features, including rich text editing, customizable templates, version history, and advanced search capabilities.
Zoho, as a company, provides a suite of various other business applications. Zoho Wiki seamlessly integrates with most of the other Zoho products and offers integrations with third-party tools as well.
What users say about Zoho Wiki:
"Zoho Wiki is quick, easy, and cheap. It lets you keep and share all your information in one place. Very easy to collaborate. Since most of my team is already using Zoho, it was easy to get them on board."
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $89/month
Rating on Capterra: 5/5
Papyrs was first launched in 2007. Over the years, it has evolved into a robust tool for creating and sharing internal wikis, intranet pages, and documents. While Outline primarily focuses on note-taking and knowledge organization, Papyrs extends its capabilities to collaborative document creation. You can create rich content with text, images, videos, and more, making it suitable for various purposes, from documentation to project planning.
Additionally, you can make parts of your knowledge base public for product documentation, customer feedback, or sharing work with clients and partners.
Keep in mind that Papyrs follows a tiered pricing model, with its cheapest plan starting at $89 per month, which may be relatively expensive for small teams.
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)
Having so many options to choose from may feel overwhelming — but it also gives you an opportunity to find an Outline alternative better tailored to your team's needs.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. The ideal alternative to Outline depends on what your team needs and likes. Luckily, all the tools in this list, except for SharePoint, have a free plan, so you can try them out before deciding. We hope this list helps you in your evaluation process.