Docmost

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 819 words

Docmost is the self-hosted wiki shaped like Confluence rather than Notion: spaces, a page tree you can nest as deep as you like, and real-time co-editing in a proper document editor with comments in the margin. Outline is the polished Notion-alike, BookStack is the shelves-and-books one, and Docmost sits between them with an editor that feels a generation newer than either. It is also the youngest of the three, first released in 2024, so treat it as a strong bet rather than a finished product, and read the section on what is gated before you commit a team to it.

Why the Confluence shape matters more than it sounds

The structural difference is the page tree. BookStack forces a fixed 3-level hierarchy of shelves, books and pages, which is tidy until a topic needs a fourth level. Outline has collections and nested documents, but its sidebar and search push you toward flat, searchable notes. Docmost gives each space an unlimited tree with drag-and-drop reordering, which is how most teams actually think about documentation: product, then feature, then component, then runbook. If you are coming off Confluence, the mental model transfers directly, and that alone saves a migration from failing on adoption.

Spaces carry their own membership and permissions, so a company wiki and an ops runbook space can have different readers on the same instance, and groups plus per-space roles cover the usual cases.

Three containers and a secret you set once

Docmost needs Postgres and Redis alongside the app; the catalogue's "requires Postgres" con is simply the architecture. The 1 GB RAM minimum covers all three on a small install.

services:
  docmost:
    image: docmost/docmost:latest
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      APP_URL: https://wiki.example.com
      APP_SECRET: replace-with-at-least-32-random-characters
      DATABASE_URL: postgresql://docmost:changeme@db:5432/docmost?schema=public
      REDIS_URL: redis://redis:6379
    volumes:
      - ./docmost-storage:/app/data/storage
    depends_on: [db, redis]
    restart: unless-stopped
  db:
    image: postgres:16
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: docmost
      POSTGRES_USER: docmost
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: changeme
    volumes:
      - ./pg:/var/lib/postgresql/data
  redis:
    image: redis:7

APP_SECRET signs sessions and tokens; generate it with openssl rand -hex 32 and never rotate it casually, because every user gets logged out and some links stop working. APP_URL must match the public address exactly, scheme included. Attachments go to the storage volume by default, with S3-compatible storage as the alternative for anything beyond a few GB of uploads. Real-time editing runs over WebSockets, so the reverse proxy must pass upgrade headers; Caddy and Traefik do, an old Nginx config might not.

Real-time editing is the feature; the editor is the reason you stay

Two people typing in the same page see each other's cursors and text within a fraction of a second, with no locking and no "someone else is editing this page" warning. The editor itself is block-based with slash commands, tables, callouts, code blocks with syntax highlighting, LaTeX, and embedded diagrams through draw.io, Excalidraw and Mermaid without leaving the page. Page history with diffs and restore is there. Search is full-text across the instance with per-space scoping. Comments attach to selected text, resolve, and thread. None of that is unique on its own; having all of it in a 2024-era editor rather than one built in 2017 is what people notice in the first hour.

What sits behind the enterprise line

Docmost is AGPL-3.0 and ships an enterprise edition. At last check, single sign-on (OIDC and SAML) and multi-factor enforcement are among the enterprise features, so the catalogue's SSO highlight is true of the product but not necessarily of the free build; verify the current split before you plan to front it with Authentik. Public page sharing, export to Markdown and HTML, and import of Markdown and HTML files are in the open build. Confluence import, if you need it, is the thing to check specifically, because the answer has changed over the project's short life.

Backups are two artefacts: a pg_dump of the database and a copy of the storage directory. Restore them together or attachments break.

What I'd do

For a team of 3 to 50 that thinks in nested pages and edits documents together, Docmost is the pick over Outline and BookStack, run as the 3-container compose above behind Caddy with nightly pg_dump plus a storage-directory copy. Pin the image tag and update deliberately, because a project this young still ships breaking changes. If you need SSO in the free tier today, or you want the project with the longest track record, BookStack remains the safe choice and the wiki category has the rest of the field. For a personal knowledge base, none of this matters and something lighter will serve you better.