Outline

What is Outline?

Outline is a team knowledge base with a Markdown editor and slash commands, realtime multiplayer editing, threaded comments, and a search that answers questions about your own documents. It is the same code that runs the hosted product at getoutline.com, and it can be run on your own infrastructure — but it is a multi-service deployment rather than a single container.

Best for

Teams that want Notion-like editing speed and already run Postgres and Redis

Why choose Outline

Outline is the fastest editor of the four, and speed is a real feature when the alternative is a wiki nobody opens because it takes six seconds to load a page. Realtime multiplayer editing, threaded comments and a search that returns answers rather than links make it feel like the commercial tools it competes with, because it is the same codebase that runs the commercial product — the self-hosted install is not a stripped-down community edition. Slack integration is genuinely useful rather than a checkbox: people can search the knowledge base from chat, which is where the question was going to be asked anyway. Permission granularity — read and write per collection, groups, guests, public links — covers the cases a real team hits.

Replaces

• Notion
• Confluence

Key features

• Markdown editor with slash commands and interactive embeds
• Realtime multiplayer editing
• Threaded comments
• Workspace search with AI question answering
• Slack integration for search and notifications
• Public link sharing with custom branding
• Groups, guests and read/write permissions
• Dark mode and right-to-left language support

What to watch out for

Two things here are more consequential than the usual caveats. The licence is not open source: Outline ships under the Business Source License 1.1, whose own text says it is not an Open Source licence, and the additional use grant forbids running it as a commercial "document service" — an offering that lets third parties outside your employees and contractors create their own teams and documents. Running it for your own organisation is what the grant permits; reselling it as a hosted wiki is not. Each version converts to Apache-2.0 on its change date, which for current releases is 2030-09-09 or four years after that version shipped, whichever comes first. Second, the maintainers state plainly that Outline is engineered as a horizontally scalable cloud platform and needs dev-ops experience to install and run in production. That is not false modesty: a working install is Outline plus PostgreSQL plus Redis plus an S3-compatible bucket or local file storage, and upgrades touch several of them.

How to deploy

• Docker Compose

Getting started

Read the official hosting documentation before you touch a terminal, and accept its framing — this is a small distributed system, not an app. Start from the project docker-compose and add the application service to it rather than writing your own from scratch. Provision S3-compatible storage, even if it is a MinIO container, because file attachments are the part people notice when they are missing. Generate the two secrets with a real random source before the first boot; changing them later invalidates sessions. If you are not comfortable operating Postgres and Redis, host Outline instead — the hosted product is the same software, and paying for it is a legitimate answer.

Typical setup

A production install is a Docker Compose stack on a small VPS: the Outline image, PostgreSQL, Redis, and an S3-compatible store such as MinIO or a bucket at whichever object storage provider you use. Authentication is pointed at Slack, Google or Microsoft Entra so accounts follow the existing directory. A reverse proxy terminates TLS. Backups have to cover the database and the attachment bucket — losing one of the two leaves you with documents whose images no longer resolve.

Who should look elsewhere

Not for anyone who wants a single container and a five-minute setup; the maintainers say as much, and the dependency list backs them up. Not if you need an OSI-approved open-source licence, because Business Source License 1.1 is explicitly not one and the commercial document-service restriction is a real term. And not if nobody on your team wants to own Postgres, Redis and object storage for the next three years.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 40,791
• Last code push: 2026-10-03
• Open issues: 83
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.