Outline

What is Outline?

Outline is a source-available team knowledge base and wiki that you can self-host or use as a hosted cloud service. Teams write in a fast real-time editor, organize pages into nested collections with their own permissions, and find anything through full-text search — with the option to ask AI questions and get answers drawn from your own documents.

What is Outline best for?

Outline is best for teams that want a polished, well-designed company wiki — the kind of editing experience people expect from Notion — but with the option to keep every document on their own infrastructure. It suits software, ops, and support teams who live in Slack, want internal docs that are easy to search and share, and don’t want to pay per seat for Confluence.

What can Outline do?

• Write in a fast editor with Markdown, slash commands, nested documents, and interactive embeds
• Collaborate in real time with comments, threads, and full document history
• Organize knowledge into collections, each with its own membership and permissions
• Search across everything with full-text search, plus AI answers grounded in your documents
• Control access with user groups, granular permissions, and guest accounts
• Search and share docs directly inside Slack, with 20+ integrations including Figma and Loom
• Publish documents publicly with custom branding and share links
• Run in 20 languages with dark mode, and automate via a full public API

Where does Outline fall short?

• It is not OSI open source — Outline ships under the Business Source License 1.1, which is source-available and converts to Apache 2.0 four years after each release, but restricts you in the meantime.
• The BSL forbids running Outline as a multi-tenant “document service” for third parties, so you can’t legally turn it into a competing hosted wiki product (self-hosting for your own organization is fine).
• Self-hosting requires an external authentication provider — Outline has no built-in email/password login, so you must wire up SSO (Google, Slack, OIDC, or similar) before anyone can sign in.

Is Outline free?

Partly. The source code is free to self-host under the BSL 1.1 — you run it on your own server and pay only for infrastructure, with no per-seat fees. The hosted cloud at getoutline.com uses flat team pricing that starts around $10/month for up to 10 members and scales by team size, after a 30-day free trial, with discounts for non-profits and education.

What does Outline replace?

Outline is a self-hosted alternative to Notion and Confluence. It covers the core team-wiki job — collaborative documents, nested collections, permissions, search, and Slack integration — without Atlassian’s per-user pricing or storing your internal knowledge in someone else’s cloud. If you want a fully OSI-licensed option instead, Docmost is a closely comparable AGPL wiki.

FAQ

Is Outline open source? Not in the strict OSI sense. Outline is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, which is source-available: the code is public and free to self-host, but commercial “document service” use is restricted until the license converts to Apache 2.0 four years after each release.

Can I self-host Outline for free? Yes. You can self-host Outline at no license cost for your own organization and pay only for the server it runs on. You’ll need to connect an SSO provider for login, since Outline ships without built-in passwords.

Is Outline a good Notion alternative? For teams that want a clean, fast wiki they fully control, yes — the editor and real-time collaboration feel close to Notion, and you keep your data. Notion still offers more freeform databases, templates, and an all-in-one workspace beyond documentation.

What do I need to run Outline? A server with Docker, a PostgreSQL database, Redis, file storage (local or S3-compatible), and an authentication provider for SSO. Outline is built on TypeScript with a React front end and Node.js back end.