Docmost

What is Docmost?

Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation platform that positions itself directly against Confluence and Notion. It offers realtime editing, a space-based permission model, built-in diagram editors and full page history, and ships as a Docker Compose stack of the application plus PostgreSQL and Redis.

Best for

Teams replacing Confluence who want diagrams and spaces out of the box

Why choose Docmost

Docmost is the closest thing here to a drop-in Confluence replacement, and the diagram support is the reason. Draw.io, Excalidraw and Mermaid are built into the editor rather than bolted on through an integration, which matters because architecture sketches and flowcharts are the content that keeps people inside a wiki. Spaces give you the separation Confluence customers are used to — a space per team or project, with its own permissions — and the permission model goes down to groups rather than just users. Page history and comments cover the review workflow. For a team migrating off Confluence, the mental model transfers almost directly, which is worth more than any individual feature.

Replaces

• Confluence
• Notion

Key features

• Realtime collaborative editing
• Draw.io, Excalidraw and Mermaid diagrams
• Spaces with group and permission management
• Comments and full page history
• Full-text search
• File attachments
• Embeds including Airtable, Loom and Miro
• Interface translated into more than ten languages

What to watch out for

The project is young: it started in 2023 and carries a few hundred open issues, which is a sign of an active backlog and of software still settling rather than of abandonment — but it does mean you should expect rough edges and read the release notes before upgrading. Licensing is split. The core is AGPL-3.0, but enterprise features in packages/ee and the two ee source directories are under a separate commercial licence, so not everything you see in the hosted version is yours to run. Telemetry is on by default and has to be disabled explicitly. The stack is three containers — application, PostgreSQL and Redis — which is more moving parts than a single-container wiki even though Compose hides most of it.

How to deploy

• Docker Compose

Getting started

Start from the project docker-compose file and change the two secrets and the database password before the first run; the shipped values are placeholders. Set a real APP_URL, because it is baked into links in ways that are annoying to fix later. Set DISABLE_TELEMETRY if you do not want the instance reporting usage. Configure SMTP early — password resets and invitations depend on it, and it is the most common thing people discover is missing only after they need it. Structure spaces the way you structured Confluence spaces, so the migration does not become an argument about information architecture.

Typical setup

Docmost usually runs as a Compose stack — app, PostgreSQL and Redis — on a small VPS or home server behind a reverse proxy, with attachments on local disk for small teams and on S3 or Azure Blob once they matter. Spaces map onto teams or projects, with groups used for permissions rather than per-user grants. Backups cover the Postgres volume and the storage volume, and both are directories in the default Compose file, which makes that straightforward.

Who should look elsewhere

Not for anyone who needs the enterprise features without paying for them — those are in a separately licensed directory, and the gap is visible in the product. Not if you want software that has been stable for a decade; this is a young, fast-moving project with a large issue backlog. And not if a three-container stack is more than you want to look after, when a single-container wiki would do the job.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 21,861
• Last code push: 2026-10-02
• Open issues: 354
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.