Should You Host Your Own Company Wiki? Pros & Cons Of Self-Hosting

Knowledge sharing only works if people can find the answer faster in the company wiki than by pinging a teammate. A company business wiki centralizes the policies, project notes, codes of conduct, and workflows that would otherwise live scattered across someone's inbox or a shared drive.

The first decision to make is wiki hosting: whether you run the software on your own servers or hand that job to a cloud provider. Setting up a company wiki means picking the knowledge management platform that fits your team's size and IT capacity, not just the one with the longest feature list.

What is a Company Wiki Software?

A company wiki software is an interactive platform that you can use to design, write, edit or publish content for your internal wiki. You can securely access the necessary features to store information curated by employees across the different departments. 

Self-hosted Company Wiki Vs Cloud-based Company Wiki

A self-hosted wiki means that the information databases are held and maintained in a private server. You may need a dedicated in-house IT team that continually updates and manages the local servers. 

A cloud-based company wiki uses a software as a service (SaaS) provider, whose dedicated team manages your wiki databases. Your data lives in the cloud with 24/7 remote access.

Advantages of Setting up a Self-hosted Company Wiki

1. Absolute Control Over Data Use 

With a self-hosted wiki you decide how and where your organization’s critical data is created and stored, and you do not have to worry about a vendor’s usage limits.

2. Enhanced Security Levels

A self-hosted wiki lets you choose the security measures and firewalls that protect your data, and your own people decide who can add entries, limit users and remove unwanted guests. That control only helps if someone keeps the server patched.

Disadvantages of Self-hosting Your Company Wiki

1. Limited Support

The greatest challenge with a self-hosted wiki is that you are responsible for maintaining and updating it. If you aren’t tech-savvy, it can be hard to identify and fix problems on your server.

Open source self-hosting programs may have you sifting through hundreds of forum pages trying to identify the problems with your setup.

2. Expensive and Time Consuming to Set Up and Maintain

You may have to buy a server to hold your wiki databases, and as your company grows you will need more storage and capacity to keep up.

Someone also has to maintain and update the server. A SaaS hosting provider, by contrast, already has a dedicated support team, which is why cloud wiki hosting is usually faster to get running.

Best self-hosted Company Knowledge Base Software

1. Wiki.js

Wiki.js is a free, open-source wiki that runs on Node.js. It has a clean interface, plenty of options for customizing how your wiki looks, and several editors: Markdown, a visual WYSIWYG editor, plain HTML and WikiText. The interface is translated into over 40 languages, and you can publish your company wiki in several languages.

2. MediaWiki

MediaWiki is arguably the most popular open-source wiki software, running well-known sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Writing and editing content is easy.

MediaWiki provides multilingual support, allowing you to translate your company’s wiki pages into multiple languages for your diverse workforce. The software is highly customizable.

3. DokuWiki

DokuWiki is a PHP-based wiki tool famous for its simple and easy-to-read syntax. The free, open-source software does not require a database. It is easy to maintain, integrate, and backup.

A wide range of extensions and plugins adds functionality beyond the traditional wiki, and there is no cap on the number of pages you can create on your company’s wiki.

Best Hosted/Cloud-based Company Knowledge Base Software

If nobody on your team can set up and maintain a self-hosted wiki, a hosted SaaS tool is the practical choice.

1. Kipwise 

Kipwise is a knowledge management platform that helps companies build up their internal knowledge base easily. It offers powerful Slack integration, browser extensions and is integrated with Google Drive, Airtable, Trello and more, so you can save and retrieve team knowledge easily, wherever you need them. 

Moving off Confluence? See Confluence alternatives for teams on Slack.

Using its real-time collaborative editor with rich embedding options, your team can edit the same doc at the same time and create visually appealing documentation easily. It also runs built-in workflows that keep the knowledge base from going stale. For example, you can set designated reviewers for your collections, and Kipwise will remind them to review the content regularly to ensure your knowledge base is always up-to-date and accurate.

For common apps including Gmail, Zendesk and Intercom, the Kipwise Chrome Extension can even suggest relevant knowledge in your knowledge base automatically based on what you are looking at without needing you to search manually.

Key Features: 

• Real-time collaborative editor
• Built-in Workflows such as content review flow, internal Q&A flow 
• Powerful Integrations with tools such as Slack, Google Drive and more
• AI knowledge suggestions to deliver knowledge to your teammates without needing them to search

2. Confluence

Confluence is Atlassian’s wiki platform. It is flexible and customizable, with ready-made templates, and your team can co-edit in real time with in-line mentions, comments and likes. A personalized feed keeps everyone updated on the pages they follow. Its free plan covers up to 10 users.

3. Tettra

Tettra is a simple wiki tool that can help document your business policies, protocols, and other critical information in a centralized location. The inbuilt workflows can help new employees to find answers to repetitive questions within your workplace. Ready-to-use templates and easy referencing help you set up your company wiki.

Choosing Your Company Wiki Hosting

The self-hosted versus cloud decision comes down to who owns the maintenance, more than features. Name the person who will patch the server and restore it from a backup. If nobody already does that for your other internal tools, the wiki becomes a part-time job, and a cloud subscription is usually the cheaper way to pay for it. If you already run infrastructure for internal tools, one more service can be cheap, and keeping data fully in-house may matter for compliance.

If you do self-host, choose the wiki by how you will back it up and leave it. DokuWiki doesn't require a database, so there is no separate database to back up. Wiki.js and MediaWiki keep content in a database, so your backup plan has to cover that database, and you should test a restore before writing the first real page. If you pick Wiki.js, use PostgreSQL: it is the recommended database, and MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server and SQLite will not be supported in the next major version.

If you are not ready to manage a self-hosted wiki, you can opt for a hosted knowledge base software provider such as Kipwise.