Documize Community

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 863 words

If your wiki needs a manager to approve a page before it goes live, Documize Community is the only self-hosted option that does it out of the box; if it does not, install BookStack and save yourself the evaluation. That is the whole decision in one line. Documize has been around since 2016, holds 2,416 stars under AGPL-3.0, and does several things well, but the approval and section-based document model is the one feature that justifies choosing it over bigger, faster-moving projects.

The document model is the point, not the wiki

Most wikis treat a page as one blob of markdown. Documize splits a document into sections, each with its own editor type: rich text, markdown, a table, a code block, or a live section pulled from an external source such as a GitHub issue list. A document can be assembled from reusable section templates, and a space, the top-level container, can be configured so that edits go into a draft that a named approver has to accept before readers see it. There are also document lifecycle states, so a runbook can be marked as draft, live or archived rather than silently rotting.

That model comes from Confluence, and the target user is a team that left Confluence for cost or data-residency reasons and misses structure more than they miss the editor. If your team lived happily in a flat markdown wiki, the sections will feel like ceremony. If you have ever had a half-edited procedure go live during an incident, the approval gate is the feature you have been asking for.

Deployment: one binary, but bring a real database

The backend is a single Go binary, which is why the catalogue lists it as a pro even though the frontend is an Ember.js app and the repository language shows as JavaScript. It does not bundle a database. You need PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB, or Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL is the one to pick for a fresh install. The container listens on port 5001 by default.

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: documize
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: change-me
      POSTGRES_DB: documize
    volumes:
      - ./pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    restart: unless-stopped

  documize:
    image: documize/community:latest
    environment:
      DOCUMIZEDBTYPE: postgresql
      DOCUMIZEDB: host=db port=5432 dbname=documize user=documize password=change-me sslmode=disable
      DOCUMIZEPORT: 5001
      DOCUMIZESALT: a-long-random-string
    ports:
      - "5001:5001"
    depends_on:
      - db
    restart: unless-stopped

The salt is used for password hashing and must not change after first run. First visit walks you through creating the initial organisation and admin account. Budget the catalogue's 512 MB for the pair; the Go process itself is small and Postgres takes most of it. Behind a reverse proxy with TLS it is a normal HTTP app with nothing unusual about websockets or paths.

SSO is real: Keycloak, LDAP and Active Directory connectors are in the community edition, which is unusual at this size and matters if you are putting it in front of 50 people.

What the commercial edition holds back

Documize the company sells an enterprise edition, and some features you might expect are there rather than in community: advanced analytics, some backup tooling, and certain integrations. The core of spaces, sections, templates, approvals, version history and SSO is in the open edition, so a small team is not crippled. Check the feature matrix on the project site before promising anything to your manager.

The bigger caveat is pace. The repository has moved slowly for several years. Releases are infrequent, issues sit, and the Ember frontend is showing its age. Nothing is broken, and a wiki is not a service that needs weekly releases, but I would not bet a 10-year knowledge base on a project whose direction I cannot read. Export is a document-by-document affair rather than a bulk dump, so plan a migration path before you commit.

Compared with the bigger wikis

BookStack is the default self-hosted wiki for a reason: a larger community, a PHP stack every host understands, a book-chapter-page hierarchy that most teams find natural, and frequent releases. It has no approval workflow. Wiki.js has the widest editor and storage options and a git sync that gives you version control for free, also with no approvals. Outline has the best editor of the three and the most Notion-like feel, and again no approval gate. So the question is only ever whether the gate matters. The rest of the wikis category and the Confluence alternatives page cover the field if the answer is no.

What I'd do

Run Documize for a team of 5 to 50 that is leaving Confluence and needs approvals or structured runbooks, on PostgreSQL, behind SSO, with nightly pg_dump backups. Everyone else should run BookStack. If you do go with Documize, spend the first week building 3 or 4 section templates, because the value of the document model only appears once documents share a shape, and put a calendar reminder every 6 months to check whether the project is still alive and your export still works.