Alternatives
Products that do what I am building an open-source Confluence and Notion alternative does
Hello HN, I am building Docmost, an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software. It is an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion. I have been working on it for the past 12 months. This is the first public release (beta). The rich-text editor has support for real-time collaboration, LaTex, inline comments, tables, and callouts to name a few. Features - Collaborative real-time editor - Spaces (Teamspace) - User permissions - Groups - Comments - Page history - Nested pages - Search - File attachments You can find screenshots of the product on the website. Website:…
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Inspired by the design and UI/UX of apps like Notion, and utility of open-source apps like StackEdit, I decided to create a minimalistic, local-only WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Some features worth highlighting: - Monaco editor and Prettier integration for code snippets - Tables (apparently the holy grail of WYSIWYG editing) - Embeds (for CodePen, CodeSandbox and YouTube, most useful for HTML or JSON exports) - Accepts Markdown paste-in, and "exports"/generates HTML, Markdown and JSON outputs - Collaboration (with real-time awareness and initial commenting system, available only when…
2023 · editor.vrite.io
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Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS. We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins. So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently. As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time. The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.). A…
2025
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Hey there HN! We’re Antonio, Luca, and Yuhang, and we’re excited to introduce Fast GraphRAG, an open-source RAG approach that leverages knowledge graphs and the 25 years old PageRank for better information retrieval and reasoning. Building a good RAG pipeline these days takes a lot of manual optimizations. Most engineers intuitively start from naive RAG: throw everything in a vector database and hope that semantic search is powerful enough. This can work for use cases where accuracy isn’t too important and hallucinations are tolerable, but it doesn’t work for more difficult queries that…
2024 · github.com
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Kalmia started as a small hobby project about two months ago, but it quickly evolved when we needed a better solution to manage our office's documentation. It has now become our go-to tool for both internal and user-facing docs. Recently, we decided to open source it, as we believe others might benefit from a lightweight, customizable documentation system like this. We're excited to see how the community can take it further, contribute, and adapt it to their own needs!
2024 · kalmia.difuse.io
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My hatred for Confluence, Notion et al. has motivated me to explore prototyping a seedling for a collaboration tool that is plaintext-friendly, built on top of Org and is still friendly for non-techies who are familiar with Notion, Google Docs and the likes in terms of usability. The page currently just renders https://gitlab.com/formation.tools/eng/engineering/-/raw/mai... which is effectively the file we use to align on work internally, so we're dogfooding this. Eventually, I would like to be able to just show any git repo and offer collaborative…
2022 · proto.formation.tools
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2023 · github.com
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We are working on an open-source .docx editor library for apps that need to edit Word documents in the browser. We just shipped 1.0. A lot of existing approaches convert .docx into HTML and lose document semantics along the way. Our editor parses OOXML directly and uses its own rendering+layout engine to produce paged documents with html/css. Edits round-trip back to .docx, so you’re always editing the document, not its representation. The core rendering engine is framework agnostic, with React and Vue ui adapters on top. It’s Apache 2.0. Happy to answer questions.
May 2026 · github.com
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Documind is an open-source tool that turns documents into structured data using AI. What it does: - Extracts specific data from PDFs based on your custom schema - Returns clean, structured JSON that's ready to use - Works with just a PDF link + your schema definition Just run npm install documind to get started.
2024 · github.com
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2018 · docute.org
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My friend and I have been feeling frustrated at how inefficient it is to find information at work. There are so many tools (Slack, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, Google Drive, etc.) and they provide different (often not great) ways to find information. We thought maybe LLMs could help, so over the last couple months we've been spending a bit of time on the side to build Danswer. It is an open source, self-hosted search tool that allows you to ask questions and get answers across common workspace apps AND your personal documents (via file upload / web scraping)! Full demo here:…
2023 · github.com
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Gitingest is a open-source micro dev-tool that I made over the last week. It turns any public Github repository into a text extract that you can give to your favourite LLM easily. Today I added this url trick to make it even easier to use! How I use it myself: - Quickly generate a README.md boilerplate for a project - Ask LLMs questions about an undocumented codebase It is still very much work in progress and I plan to add many more options (file size limits, exclude patterns..) and a public API I hope this tool can help you Your feedback is very valuable to help me prioritize And…
2024 · gitingest.com
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Hi HN, I built Ephe, open-source markdown paper for daily todos and thoughts. No sign-up, no ads, no subscriptions, no AI. ## Why I made this We have plenty of Markdown editors. And too many overwhelming to-do apps. But few tools combine both in a way that’s lightweight and focused. I thought that all I need is a single page to organize today. So I built Ephe. It uses CodeMirror v6, React(v19, React Compiler) and Vite with rolldown. ## What makes it different “Ephe” comes from ephemeral. The main goal is to organize what you need to do today. It isn’t for teams. It’s a quiet space for your…
2025 · github.com
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In the last few years I've been doing a lot of technical writing, both for my own programming blog and others, and I've noticed there is a lack of good tools for this kind of writing. Whether that was a programming blog post or documentation, I always had to move back an forth between different editors, and sometimes even other apps for content management and the actual content publication. A lot of copy-pasting, and wasted time. Based on this experience I decided to try and build a tool that could provide a good experience for this kind of content from writing to publishing. This (I call it…
2023 · vrite.io
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Hi HN! I'm excited to share a project I've been working on for the past year: Docland. It is an API documentation browser that generates documentation on demand (through compilation, not LLMs) for Java packages. Instead of relying on Javadoc, the built-in doc generator, I created the engine from scratch to give the documentations a modern look, build fast search indexes, and enable link resolution to other packages. I built Docland because I constantly found it frustrating to locate and view API definitions when programming. You'd have to Google the function/class name, skip all the SEO…
2024 · docland.io
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Hi HN! We’re Marc and Iuliia from Papermark (https://papermark.io). We're building an open-source, modern document sharing platform with real-time engagement analytics and 100% customization. It all started as a tweet [1] and led to our launch on Product Hunt [2] last month. We crossed over 1000 stars and over 10 contributors on GitHub (https://github.com/mfts/papermark). Incumbents, like DocSend, founded in the early 2010s have been acquired already and just don't innovate anymore. Their main priority is enterprise clients. As founders and developers ourselves…
2023 · papermark.io
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