European Alternatives to Confluence
Looking for a European alternative to Confluence? Atlassian Corporation has been a Delaware company since October 2022, its customer agreement is governed by Californian law outside Europe, and the self-hosted Data Center edition is scheduled to become read-only on 28 March 2029.
No European tool is an exact copy, but eleven cover the wiki: open-source engines you can host yourself, lightweight hosted wikis, a Belgian knowledge platform, a Swiss Jira and Confluence replacement and two larger suites.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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1
European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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2
Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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3
Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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4
Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
11 European Alternatives to Confluence
XWiki
Paris open-source wiki under the LGPL with a published Confluence migration page and toolkit
Nuclino
Lightweight hosted team wiki from near Munich with a free plan of up to 50 items
BlueSpice
Enterprise wiki on MediaWiki from Regensburg, with German cloud hosting and a free edition
Elium
Belgian knowledge platform with expiry, approval workflows and AI search, from EUR 15 per user per month
rready (sovara)
Zurich platform that replaces Jira and Confluence together, hosted in Switzerland or the EU or on-premise
BookStack
Free MIT-licensed self-hosted wiki built on books, chapters and pages, with paid support from a UK company
Papyrs
Eindhoven team wiki and intranet priced per site, with a free Personal Wiki and EU hosting
Nextcloud
Stuttgart file and collaboration platform whose free Collectives app adds a Markdown wiki
DokuWiki
Open-source wiki that stores plain text files and needs no database, created in Berlin
eXo Platform
Paris open-source digital workplace with a knowledge hub, AGPL Community Edition and a SaaS edition
Saga
London notes and docs workspace with a free plan, closer to Notion than to a company wiki
Key takeaways
- Atlassian Corporation has been a Delaware company since 3 October 2022. Its customer agreement is under Irish law for EMEA customers and Californian law elsewhere, and Data Center, the self-hosted version, ends on 28 March 2029.
- There is no one-to-one European copy of Confluence. This page lists eleven tools, and they are not interchangeable: wikis, a knowledge platform, a Jira and Confluence replacement and two larger suites.
- XWiki (Paris) and BlueSpice (Regensburg) are the two that pitch themselves directly against Confluence, with a published migration path, and both can be self-hosted.
- Nuclino (Grünwald) and Papyrs (Eindhoven) are the lightweight hosted wikis, with a free plan at Nuclino and a flat monthly price per site at Papyrs, not per user.
- BookStack and DokuWiki are free and open source, but neither has a company behind it in the usual sense: BookStack sells support through a UK company, and DokuWiki is run by an individual in Berlin and a community.
- Elium (Belgium), rready (Zürich), Nextcloud (Stuttgart), eXo (Paris) and Saga (London) each cover a different slice, and none of them is a general-purpose wiki in the way the first six are.
Why people leave Confluence
Confluence is the default company wiki, and it earned that. Spaces, page trees, permissions per space, templates, comments and a vast Marketplace of macros turn it into the place where an organisation writes down how it works. It sits next to Jira, so a ticket can link to the page that explains it.
It is also a US company. Atlassian Corporation redomiciled from the United Kingdom to Delaware on 3 October 2022, Sydney is still listed as its global headquarters and San Francisco as its US headquarters, and its customer agreement is governed by Irish law for customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and by Californian law elsewhere. A wiki is the least replaceable thing a company owns, because it holds decisions and procedures rather than tickets.
The self-hosted route is closing as well. Atlassian says Data Center, the only version you can still run yourself, ends on 28 March 2029 and becomes read-only, and new customers could no longer buy it from 30 March 2026. Europe has answers, but they differ more than the Jira alternatives do: eleven tools here, from a lightweight wiki to a self-hosted knowledge platform, and none is a pure copy of Confluence.
- A wiki holds what the company knows Issues expire when they are closed. Wiki pages do not: they hold procedures, architecture decisions, onboarding guides, customer commitments and the reasoning behind all of it. Putting that in a service owned by a Delaware corporation is a different decision from putting a ticket queue there, and many procurement rules treat them differently.
- The jurisdiction question is the same as for Jira, the content is more sensitive Atlassian Corporation has been a Delaware company since October 2022. Its customer agreement points European customers to Irish courts, but the parent that would receive a US order is American. This page does not repeat the Jira argument about issue data, and it does not claim that your pages are read. The point is narrower: the corporate parent of your wiki is not European.
- The self-hosted version is being retired Atlassian states that Confluence Data Center licences expire on 28 March 2029 and become read-only, with no new Data Center purchases from new customers since 30 March 2026. For an organisation that kept Confluence on its own servers for compliance reasons, the vendor-run option is leaving. Four tools here can run on your own infrastructure: XWiki, BlueSpice, BookStack and DokuWiki, with eXo and Nextcloud as larger platforms.
- The alternatives are not one market A Confluence replacement can mean a wiki you edit in a browser (Nuclino, Papyrs, BookStack), a structured self-hosted engine (XWiki, BlueSpice, DokuWiki), a knowledge platform with governance and AI search (Elium), a combined Jira and Confluence replacement (rready), or a wiki inside something larger (Nextcloud, eXo). Which one is a fair swap depends on which part of Confluence your teams actually use.
What you have to replace, not just match
Decide which Confluence you are replacing before you compare. Most teams use three things: pages that people write and find, spaces with permissions, and links into Jira. The first two are covered by every wiki here. The third is only covered by rready, which replaces Jira and Confluence together, and by nothing else on this page. If your pages are full of Jira macros and third-party apps from the Marketplace, expect to rebuild those rather than move them.
Test migration on one space first. XWiki publishes a Confluence migration page and a Confluence Migration Toolkit extension, BlueSpice has a Confluence comparison page and a published case study for a German federal ministry, and rready quotes a migration of more than 100,000 records for BMW.
The other tools here do not publish a Confluence importer that we could verify, so plan an export and a manual import, and keep Confluence read-only in parallel until your teams have stopped searching it.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | XWiki | Paris, France | Free self-hosted / XWiki Cloud from about €3 per user per month | EU (France) |
| #2 | Nuclino | Munich, Germany | Free tier / from about €6 per user per month | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | BlueSpice | Regensburg, Germany | Free edition / Pro and Farm editions on subscription | EU (Germany) |
| #8 | Nextcloud | Stuttgart, Germany | Free self-hosted / Enterprise plans on request | EU (Germany) |
| #10 | eXo Platform | Paris, France | Community Edition free self-hosted under AGPL / Enterprise and eXo Hubs on tailored per-user annual subscription (quote-based) | EU (France) |
How each alternative compares to Confluence
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure, or XWiki Cloud EU.
- Source code. Open source, where Confluence is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Organisations that want a structured, extensible wiki they can host themselves
XWiki is run by XWiki SAS, a Paris company (RCS Paris 477 865 281) whose founder Ludovic Dubost started the software in 2004. The code is distributed under the LGPL, so you can download and run it yourself, and the same company sells a cloud edition, support and a paid Pro offering.
It is the tool on this page that most resembles Confluence in kind: a wiki with nested pages, rights, extensions and the ability to build small applications on top of the data. Its website has a Confluence migration page, and its extension store carries a Confluence Migration Toolkit.
Its pricing page sells Starter through Enterprise by team size and says Pro and support cost the same in the cloud or on premises, but the amounts are generated in the browser and could not be checked, so none is quoted here. Expect a steeper set-up than the lightweight tools.
What XWiki does better than Confluence
- French company under French law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Open source under the LGPL, so you can host it and leave
- Published Confluence migration page and a Migration Toolkit extension
- Same price in the cloud and on premises for the paid edition
Where XWiki is a step down from Confluence
- More to configure than Nuclino, Papyrs or BookStack
- Fewer third-party apps than Confluence's Marketplace
- No Jira link: tickets live elsewhere
- Paid prices vary by team size and are not simple to read from the site
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here that pairs a self-hosted open-source wiki with a published Confluence migration toolkit.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Confluence is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Small and mid-sized teams who found Confluence too heavy
Nuclino is run by Nuclino GmbH, registered at the Munich court (HRB 227745) with its office in Grünwald near Munich, and its terms are the terms of Nuclino GmbH. It is a hosted service only: you cannot run Nuclino on your own servers.
It treats a wiki as quickly written pages in a workspace, with real-time editing and canvases for diagrams. The free plan holds up to 50 items and 3 canvases, Starter removes the limits, and Business adds SAML single sign-on, an audit log, unlimited version history and AI features.
That simplicity is the point and the limit. There are no Confluence-style macros or app marketplace, and we could not verify a Confluence importer. The prices on its pricing page are rendered in the browser and could not be checked, so no figure is given.
What Nuclino does better than Confluence
- German company under German law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- A free plan, and a 14-day trial of Starter with no card
- Fast to learn and start writing in, with real-time editing
- Business plan includes SAML single sign-on and an audit log
Where Nuclino is a step down from Confluence
- Hosted only, so no self-hosted option as Data Center was
- Free plan caps at 50 items
- No Confluence-style macros or Marketplace
- No published Confluence import that we could verify
Standout against Confluence. It is the simplest tool here to adopt, and the only one with a ready-made free plan for a small team.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure, or German hosting.
- Source code. Open source, where Confluence is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Industrial, public-sector and ISO-minded organisations that want German hosting or an on-premise wiki
BlueSpice is a product of Hallo Welt! GmbH in Regensburg (HRB 10467, Amtsgericht Regensburg), which describes itself as a provider and consultant for MediaWiki solutions. It builds enterprise features on top of MediaWiki and sells a free community edition, a pro edition and a farm edition for many wikis.
It publishes a direct BlueSpice-versus-Confluence comparison and a success story of a German federal ministry that replaced Confluence with it. BlueSpice Cloud lists Germany as its data residence, with a European server provider and a 99.9 percent availability figure, and the editions can also run on your own infrastructure.
Prices are not on a simple page: you build a quote in a configurator, so no figure is quoted here. The free edition has fewer features and no professional support.
What BlueSpice does better than Confluence
- German company with a German cloud option, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Free community edition and the option to self-host
- Published Confluence comparison and a ministry case study
- Built on MediaWiki, the engine behind a very large public wiki ecosystem
Where BlueSpice is a step down from Confluence
- The MediaWiki heritage shows in the editing model compared with Nuclino or Papyrs
- Prices come from a configurator, not a list
- Free edition has fewer features and no professional support
- No Jira link
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here built on MediaWiki, with a German cloud and a published case of a ministry leaving Confluence.
Elium
a Belgian knowledge platform with governance and AI search
Best for: Organisations whose problem is keeping knowledge accurate and answerable, rather than writing a wiki
Elium is run by WHATEVER S.A. in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgian enterprise number BE 0889.962.726) and is governed by Belgian law. It began in 2008 as Knowledge Plaza and describes itself as independently owned, which is its own statement rather than something we could confirm in a register.
It is not a general wiki. It is a knowledge platform with expiry reminders, review and approval workflows, gap and duplicate detection, AI search and answers with sources, and decision trees. It is sold as SaaS, as a private cloud or on-premise, with sovereign and SecNumCloud options on its Enterprise plan.
Its pricing page lists Team at €15 and Corporate at €20 per user per month, with a saving on annual billing. We found no free plan, only a free trial request, and its own site says it is ISO 27001 certified.
What Elium does better than Confluence
- Belgian company under Belgian law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Review, approval and expiry workflows that keep pages current
- Hosting as SaaS, private cloud or on-premise
- Clear public price for the Team and Corporate plans
Where Elium is a step down from Confluence
- Aimed at knowledge management, not a developer or documentation wiki
- No free plan found, only a trial
- Per-user pricing on every plan
- Heavier than Nuclino or Papyrs for a small team
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here built around keeping knowledge current, with expiry and approval workflows as its core.
rready (sovara)
the one that replaces Jira and Confluence together, from Zürich
Best for: Large organisations leaving the whole Atlassian stack, including Data Center
sovara is a product of rready AG, registered in Zürich (UID CHE-346.264.137), which was spun out of Swisscom in 2021. It markets itself as a sovereign alternative to Jira and Confluence in one platform, covering project planning, issue tracking, knowledge management, asset and service management and automation.
Its site says it can be hosted in Switzerland or the EU, on-premise or on a cloud of your choice (including Google or AWS), that it holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and that it costs up to 30 percent less than Atlassian. Those are its own statements. It cites a migration of more than 100,000 records for BMW.
It is demo-based, with no public price and no free plan that we could find, so this page cannot tell you what it costs. It overlaps with the Jira page on this site, and here it is ranked on what it does for the wiki.
What rready (sovara) does better than Confluence
- Swiss company outside US law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Replaces both Jira and Confluence, so the links between them stay
- On-premise and sovereign-cloud options
- A stated migration track record from Atlassian
Where rready (sovara) is a step down from Confluence
- No public price and no free plan
- A young product from a company whose earlier products were innovation and workflow software
- The wiki is one part of a larger platform, not the focus
- Switzerland is outside the EU, though it has an adequacy decision
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here that replaces the Jira and Confluence pair as one platform, but it is sold through a demo, with no price on the site.
BookStack
a simple, free, self-hosted wiki with a book metaphor
Best for: IT teams that want a free, easy documentation wiki on their own server
BookStack is an open-source project created by Dan Brown, licensed under MIT, written in PHP on the Laravel framework and storing data in MySQL. Content is organised into Books, Chapters and Pages, with a WYSIWYG editor, an optional Markdown editor with live preview and built-in diagrams.net drawing.
It supports email and password, OIDC, SAML2 and LDAP sign-in, multi-factor authentication that can be enforced per role, and roles and permissions to lock content down. It has no hosted version that we could find: the project describes itself as self-hosted.
Paid support is sold by HTTP Functions Ltd, a UK company in Farnham, Surrey, at £450 a year for the Professional plan and £4,500 a year for Enterprise. There is no vendor in the usual sense behind the software itself.
What BookStack does better than Confluence
- Free and MIT licensed, with nothing to pay to host it
- Simple Book, Chapter and Page structure that people learn quickly
- OIDC, SAML2, LDAP and enforced MFA for self-hosted use
- Support available from a UK company from £450 a year
Where BookStack is a step down from Confluence
- Self-hosted only, so you need a server and someone to run it
- Fixed three-level structure is less flexible than spaces and page trees
- No Jira link and no Marketplace
- UK, not EU, under the UK adequacy decision
Standout against Confluence. It is the simplest free wiki here to install and explain, in exchange for a rigid Books, Chapters and Pages structure.
Papyrs
a team wiki and intranet from Eindhoven with a price per site, not per user
Best for: Teams who want a hosted wiki with a predictable monthly price
Papyrs is run by Stunf B.V., a Dutch company headquartered in Eindhoven, and its terms state that Dutch law applies. It describes itself as a team wiki and company intranet, with a drag-and-drop editor, a command palette, a Markdown toggle and widgets such as polls, forms, checklists and calendars.
Its sub-processor list says all data is hosted in the EU: TransIP in the Netherlands, Hetzner in Germany and Finland and AWS in Ireland. AWS is a US company, so that last host is the one to ask about if jurisdiction is your concern.
Pricing is per site rather than per user. A Personal Wiki for one user is free, Team Wiki lists €89 a month billed monthly or €80 on annual billing for up to 20 users, and Company Wiki €354 or €319 for up to 60 users, with a custom domain and SAML single sign-on.
What Papyrs does better than Confluence
- Dutch company under Dutch law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Price per site, so adding a colleague costs nothing until you reach the cap
- A free Personal Wiki and a 14-day trial
- Editor with widgets, Markdown toggle and full version history
Where Papyrs is a step down from Confluence
- Hosted only, with no self-hosted option
- Uses AWS in Ireland among its hosts
- Per-site caps of 20 and 60 users push larger teams to the expensive plans
- SAML single sign-on only from the Company Wiki plan
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here priced per site, so a 20-person team pays the same as a 5-person one.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Wherever you host it.
- Source code. Open source, where Confluence is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Organisations already on Nextcloud who want a wiki in the same place
Nextcloud is run by Nextcloud GmbH in Stuttgart (HRB 227086), and its Collectives app is the part relevant to Confluence. Each collective is backed by a Nextcloud Team, so the content belongs to the group, not to one user, and pages are written in Markdown with collaborative editing through the Text app and full-text search.
Collectives is licensed under AGPL v3 or later and installs from the Nextcloud App Store, so it runs wherever your Nextcloud runs. It is a wiki bolted onto a file platform, with spaces and page structure, not a replacement for Confluence's macros or Marketplace.
You need a Nextcloud server first, either your own or one from a provider, and the app is only as capable as that installation. Nextcloud sells enterprise support separately and no price is quoted here.
What Nextcloud does better than Confluence
- German company under German law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Free AGPL app on a platform you can run yourself
- Content owned by a team, with files and calendar in the same place
- No separate wiki service to administer if you already run Nextcloud
Where Nextcloud is a step down from Confluence
- Needs a Nextcloud server before it is any use
- A lighter wiki than XWiki or BlueSpice, with no Confluence importer we could verify
- No Jira link and no Marketplace of macros
- Markdown-first editing suits some teams better than others
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here that is a wiki feature inside a file-sync and collaboration platform, which suits you only if you already run it.
DokuWiki
the plainest wiki here: text files, no database, no company
Best for: Small teams and technical users who want a wiki that is easy to back up and move
DokuWiki is open-source software created in 2004 by Andreas Gohr, who lives in Berlin, and maintained with a community under the GPL v2. It is written in PHP and stores pages as plain text files, so it needs no database and a backup is a copy of a folder.
It has an access control system, plugins and templates, and the project says it is available in 74 languages. There is no vendor behind it that sells hosting or a service level, so this is a wiki you run and look after yourself.
We could not reach dokuwiki.org, which showed a bot check, so the facts here come from its repository and public references. It is the least like Confluence in feel on this page, and it is worth choosing for portability, not polish.
What DokuWiki does better than Confluence
- Free, GPL v2, with no database to run
- Pages are plain text files, so backups and moves are simple
- Created and led from Berlin, outside US law
- Plugins and templates for most basic wiki needs
Where DokuWiki is a step down from Confluence
- No company, no hosting and no service level
- Editing is aimed at technical users compared with Nuclino or Papyrs
- No Jira link and no Confluence importer we could verify
- Little built-in support for rich media compared with a modern editor
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here that needs no database and has no company behind it, which makes it very portable and unsupported.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Atlassian Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, United States, and run from Sydney, Australia, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Self-hosted, or private cloud with a SecNumCloud-qualified option for Enterprise.
- Source code. Open source, where Confluence is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Organisations that want an intranet and a wiki in one open-source platform
eXo Platform is run by eXo Platform SAS in Paris (RCS Paris 450 511 506), which describes itself as family-owned and independent. It has offices in Paris, San Francisco and La Marsa, and the legal company is French.
It is a digital workplace rather than a wiki: a social intranet with a knowledge hub, spaces, tasks and a portal. Its FAQ says the Community Edition is available under the AGPL, with an Enterprise Edition on top of the same codebase, and an eXo Hubs SaaS for teams.
Enterprise prices are by quote and no figure is given on the site that we found. For a team that only wants a wiki it is more than it needs.
What eXo Platform does better than Confluence
- French company under French law, where Atlassian Corporation is a Delaware company
- Community Edition under the AGPL that you can host yourself
- Intranet, spaces and tasks as well as knowledge pages
- eXo Hubs gives a ready-made SaaS edition
Where eXo Platform is a step down from Confluence
- A digital workplace, so heavier than a wiki
- Enterprise prices are by quote
- Less focused on documentation structure than XWiki or BlueSpice
- An office in San Francisco alongside the French company
Standout against Confluence. It is the only option here that is a full intranet and digital workplace with the knowledge hub as one part.
Saga
a UK notes and docs workspace, closer to Notion than to Confluence
Best for: Small teams that want connected pages and tasks with a free start
Saga is run by Saga Labs Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales (company number 12925504) with a registered office in London, active at Companies House.
It sells itself as an AI workspace for notes, docs and tasks, with unlimited pages on the free plan, three members per workspace, public pages and workspaces, and linked pages. The paid Standard plan is listed at $6 per member per month with unlimited members and version history, and a Business plan at $12 is on a waitlist.
It is a small company and a notes tool first, so it is the weakest Confluence substitute on this page for a company wiki with spaces and permissions. Its privacy policy says servers are in England and Wales or the EU where possible.
What Saga does better than Confluence
- UK company, not a Delaware one
- Free plan with unlimited pages
- Low listed price for the Standard plan
- Pages, tasks and links in one workspace
Where Saga is a step down from Confluence
- A notes workspace, not a company wiki with spaces and permissions
- Small company with a Business plan still on a waitlist
- No self-hosted option found, and priced in dollars
- UK, not EU, under the UK adequacy decision
Standout against Confluence. Its listed $6 per member is well below Elium's €15, and it is the tool least like Confluence.
What actually breaks when you switch
The hard part of leaving Confluence is not the pages, which export, but the structure and the links. Spaces become namespaces or workspaces, labels become tags, and every page that points at a Jira issue loses its macro. Budget a week for the first space and look at the pages people actually open before you move the ones nobody has touched in two years.
Search is the habit that changes most. People search Confluence, and a new wiki is only as good as what you import and how you tag it. Elium is the one here built around keeping content current, with expiry reminders and approval workflows, and a lightweight tool such as Nuclino or Papyrs works if you keep the page count small.
Self-hosting means you own the upgrades. BookStack, DokuWiki, XWiki, BlueSpice and Nextcloud are easy to start and need patching, backups and someone responsible for them. If you left Confluence Data Center for compliance reasons, make sure that owner exists before you move.
Is there a European tool that works exactly like Confluence?
Not that we could verify. Confluence combines a wiki, spaces with permissions, a macro and Marketplace ecosystem and a tight link to Jira. The nearest in scope is rready's sovara, which sells itself as a replacement for Jira and Confluence together, but it is a young product aimed at large organisations, with demo-based sales and no public price.
For the wiki part alone, XWiki and BlueSpice are the closest in depth: both have spaces or namespaces, permissions, extensions and a published route from Confluence. The simpler tools (Nuclino, Papyrs, BookStack) trade that depth for ease of use, and each entry says which trade it makes.
Can I keep my wiki on my own servers?
Yes, with XWiki (LGPL), BlueSpice (a free community edition, plus pro and farm editions), BookStack (MIT) and DokuWiki (GPL v2, plain text files, no database). Nextcloud Collectives (AGPL v3) runs inside a Nextcloud server, and eXo's Community Edition is under the AGPL. rready says sovara can run on-premise, and Elium offers private cloud and on-premise hosting on request.
Nuclino, Papyrs and Saga are hosted services only. That matters because Confluence Data Center, the version you can run yourself, is scheduled to become read-only on 28 March 2029.
Which of these have a free plan?
Nuclino (up to 50 items and 3 canvases), Papyrs (a Personal Wiki with one user), Saga (three members per workspace) and the free editions of BookStack, DokuWiki, XWiki, BlueSpice, Nextcloud and eXo if you host them yourself. Elium and rready showed no free plan on their sites, only a free trial at Elium and a demo at rready.
A free self-hosted edition still costs a server and someone to keep it patched, and the support that comes with a paid edition is usually the real difference.
How do I move pages out of Confluence?
Confluence can export a space, and every tool here can take Markdown or HTML in some form. The two with a published Confluence route are XWiki, which has a migration page and a Confluence Migration Toolkit in its extension store, and BlueSpice, which publishes a comparison and a case study of a ministry that moved. The others need a plan: export a space, convert it, import it, and then fix the links and attachments by hand.
Do one space first and look at what breaks. Macros, Jira issue links and Marketplace content do not come across in any tool on this page.
Which one to pick
If you want depth, self-hosting and a published migration route, XWiki is the one, with BlueSpice as the closest second, particularly if you want German hosting or an enterprise MediaWiki. Expect more set-up than with the lighter tools.
If your team found Confluence too heavy, Nuclino has a free plan and the least to learn, and Papyrs gives a flat monthly price per site with the option of a free Personal Wiki. If your teams are developers and IT staff who want a free self-hosted wiki, BookStack is the easiest to explain and DokuWiki the easiest to back up.
If the real problem is keeping knowledge accurate and answerable, Elium is built for it. If you are leaving Jira and Confluence together and your organisation is large, rready is the only tool here that covers both, with a demo instead of a price. Nextcloud and eXo make sense if you already run them, and Saga is a notes workspace rather than a wiki.
Be realistic about the gap. Confluence is a mature product with a large Marketplace and a link to Jira, and none of these eleven reproduces it. Switch if the Delaware parent or the end of Data Center is the issue, and keep Confluence if your teams depend on its macros and its apps.
Frequently Asked Questions
XWiki is the best all-round answer if you want depth, self-hosting and a published Confluence migration path, and BlueSpice is the closest second for the same reasons. Nuclino and Papyrs suit teams that want a simple hosted wiki, and Elium suits organisations that want governance and AI search over their knowledge. None is a drop-in copy of Confluence.
Yes. Atlassian Corporation, which owns Confluence, redomiciled from the United Kingdom to Delaware on 3 October 2022. Its website lists Sydney as the global headquarters and San Francisco as the US headquarters, and its customer agreement is governed by Irish law for customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and by Californian law for everyone else.
Atlassian says Data Center subscriptions and their Marketplace apps expire on 28 March 2029, which makes them read-only. New customers could no longer buy Data Center from 30 March 2026, and existing customers can expand until 30 March 2028. Atlassian points customers to its cloud.
Yes, several. BookStack is MIT-licensed and runs on PHP and MySQL, DokuWiki is GPL v2 and needs no database, XWiki is LGPL, and BlueSpice has a free community edition. Each needs a server and someone to maintain it, and only XWiki, BlueSpice and BookStack have a company that sells support (XWiki SAS in Paris, Hallo Welt! GmbH in Regensburg and HTTP Functions Ltd in the UK).
Nuclino has a free plan limited to 50 items and 3 canvases, a Starter plan and a Business plan, both priced per user per month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card. The prices on its pricing page are rendered in the browser and could not be checked for this page, so no figure is quoted here. Business adds SAML single sign-on and an audit log.
Papyrs charges per site, not per user. Its pricing page lists a free Personal Wiki for one user, Team Wiki at €89 a month billed monthly or €80 on annual billing for up to 20 users, and Company Wiki at €354 monthly or €319 annually for up to 60 users. A Company Intranet plan removes the user limit. Prices can change and you can also pay in dollars.
Elium lists Team at €15 per user per month and Corporate at €20 per user per month, with 17 percent saved on annual billing, and a custom Enterprise plan. We found no free plan, only a request for a free trial. It runs as SaaS, in a private cloud or on-premise.
BookStack is an open-source project created and led by Dan Brown, MIT licensed, with no company behind the software itself. Paid support is sold by HTTP Functions Ltd, a UK company registered in Farnham, Surrey, at £450 a year for the Professional plan and £4,500 a year for Enterprise. The project does not offer a hosted service that we could find, so you run it yourself.
No. DokuWiki is open-source software created in 2004 by Andreas Gohr, who lives in Berlin, and maintained with a community under the GPL v2. It stores pages as plain text files with no database. There is no vendor selling a service level, so support comes from the community or from third parties.
Check each one. Papyrs says all its data is hosted in the EU, with servers at TransIP in the Netherlands, Hetzner in Germany and Finland and AWS in Ireland. BlueSpice Cloud lists Germany as its data residence with a European server provider.
Elium says it is hosted in Europe. rready says Switzerland or the EU or on-premise. Saga says its servers are in England and Wales or the EU where possible. Where the host is an American cloud provider, data residency is not the same as jurisdiction.
Because they are not European companies as far as we could verify. Slite's legal page names Slite, Inc., a Delaware corporation, as the service operator, and says its French SAS does not contract with customers. Outline is operated by General Outline, Inc. in New York. Docmost operates as Docmost, Inc., and we could not find an address for it.
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