Ask HN: What's a modern alternative to Confluence for small dev teams?

5 pointsposted 5 months ago
by ivarojha

Item id: 45214077

8 Comments

ProcessOptimist

5 months ago

You're hitting on the biggest problem with dev docs: they're always scattered because well they just want to jump straight back into coding.

For what you're describing, a place for onboarding, docs, and connecting to dev tools like GitHub, Superthread is a good fit. The layout is a lot more opinionated than Notion to reduce clunky navigation or UI.

It’s a place where docs and tasks are connected, so you're not jumping between a wiki and a task tracker. Specifically for devs it also has sprint functionality.

[https://superthread.com/]

prxtl

5 months ago

It doesn't completely fit your needs (does anything?), but I really like Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) especially because stuff like Notion and Confluence feels so slow and bloated.

trcarney

5 months ago

Something we are working on my team is an internal Astro Starlight site. It is all in markdown so if your team is backend focused, the can still maintain it, and then all the docs are markdown files that are tracked with git. Comes with basic search already built in too.

So far we like the idea of this approach but haven't fully set it up yet

coronapl

5 months ago

We recently added an Astro Starlight site to our monorepo, and it’s been great. Whenever someone makes a significant change, the PR includes the corresponding docs update, which makes reviews much more complete.

Another benefit: since the docs live in the repo, they’re easy to feed into AI tools.You just drop the relevant Markdown files in as context. This workflow has worked really well for us.

The only real headache was adding auth to our Wiki, but we eventually found a simple solution.

toomuchtodo

5 months ago

Why not make Notion the canonical system of record for this? Github is for code, Slack is for ephemeral chat. Anything that must persists should be stored in Notion (and you can link to Github references from within Notion).

ivarojha

5 months ago

Notion does solve this upto an extent. I think the problem I face with it is that it tries to be an "everything" app for teams. They've designed it in a generic fashion.

We have so much documentation in Notion for different parts of work: i.e. internal finance, support, marketing, sales, ad-hoc ideas docs. And then when dev and several parts of dev lifecycle are added to it, it looks like a clusterf*ck (excuse my language). Everything is in your face and navigation seems clunky when you organise things one under the other. And for some reason, editing docs feels like I'm typing on a remote server with 300ms delay (on my linux device, works smoothly on Mac).

This is a reason why I like Linear. An opinionated planning product.