Documents and notes decision
Confluence
A small team can reproduce a basic wiki, but Confluence's durable advantages—FedRAMP compliance, large integrations marketplace, and enterprise-grade infrastructure—are expensive or slow to replicate, so keep paying for full Confluence for enterprise needs.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Create and edit rich wiki-style pages, search and browse content, manage space/page permissions, and view page history/versions.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise compliance certifications (FedRAMP etc.)
- Large ecosystem marketplace of apps and integrations
- Enterprise-grade, highly-resilient global infrastructure and SLAs
- Years of product polish, templates, and admin tooling
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
FedRAMP Compliant solutions for the public sector
- Integration maintenance
Marketplace Connect thousands of apps to your Atlassian products
- Infrastructure at scale
Resilience Enterprise-grade & highly performant infrastructure
First-year cost
No published price
Confluence does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted Confluence-like knowledge workspace using Next.js (React) frontend, Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres for structured data, OpenSearch for full-text search, and S3-compatible object storage for attachments. In scope: WYSIWYG editor that saves pages and revisions, page version history, spaces and per-space permissions, authentication (OAuth + local accounts), attachment upload/download, site-wide search, and a small admin UI for managing users/spaces. Out of scope: marketplace/apps, enterprise compliance (FedRAMP), multi-region HA, and advanced analytics. Include logging, input validation, permission checks, error handling, and automated unit + integration tests; provide Docker Compose and a one-file deploy script and README with setup steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score26
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAtlassian home
- official pricingPurchasing & Licensing
- official docsAtlassian Product Collection
- open sourcedocumize/community
- open sourceAIDotNet/OpenDeepWiki
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
