Outline

Outline is an open source knowledge base and wiki platform designed for teams that need a fast, beautiful, and well-organized space for documentation, meeting notes, onboarding guides, and internal knowledge sharing. With its clean editor, flexible organization, and strong integration capabilities, Outline has become a popular choice for teams seeking an open source alternative to Confluence, Notion, and other wiki tools.

The editing experience in Outline is one of its most celebrated features. The editor is fast, responsive, and distraction-free, with support for rich formatting including headings, paragraphs, bullet and numbered lists, task lists, code blocks with syntax highlighting, tables, images, video embeds, mathematical expressions, and mentions. The slash command menu provides quick access to all formatting options without leaving the keyboard, making writing and formatting feel natural and efficient.

Documents in Outline are organized in a hierarchical tree structure with collections serving as top-level containers and nested documents underneath. This nesting can go multiple levels deep, enabling teams to build comprehensive knowledge bases with logical hierarchy. Documents can be linked to each other, creating a connected web of knowledge that is easy to navigate.

Search in Outline is fast and full-text, indexing the content of all documents for instant retrieval. The search results can be filtered by collection, author, and date, making it easy to find specific information even in large knowledge bases with hundreds or thousands of documents. The global keyboard shortcut for search allows users to find any document without lifting their hands from the keyboard.

Real-time collaboration is built into Outline. Multiple team members can edit the same document simultaneously, with changes appearing in real time for all participants. The document history feature tracks every change with timestamps and author information, allowing teams to review the evolution of a document and restore previous versions if needed.

Outline integrates natively with Slack, allowing users to share documents directly in Slack channels, preview document content without leaving Slack, and receive notifications about document updates. Integrations with Google, GitHub, Figma, and other tools allow rich embeds of external content directly within documents. Single sign-on support for Google Workspace, Okta, Azure AD, and any SAML 2.0 or OIDC provider simplifies user management for teams already using these identity providers.

The permission system in Outline allows documents to be public, private, or shared with specific collections or individual team members. Collection-level permissions define the default visibility of documents within each collection, while individual document permissions allow exceptions to the collection-level defaults.

Outline can be self-hosted using Docker and requires a PostgreSQL database, Redis, and an S3-compatible storage service for file attachments. The configuration is straightforward, and the community provides helpful guides for deploying to popular platforms. The managed Outline Cloud service is available for teams that want all the functionality without the operational overhead of self-hosting.