Alexandrie: A Self-Hosted Wiki That Replaces Notion and Confluence

Every team eventually needs a place to put what it knows: the onboarding steps, the password policy, the pricing rules, the reason a decision was made two years ago. Most reach for Notion or Confluence. Both are good products. Both also charge per seat, keep your documents on someone else's servers, and change their pricing when it suits them.

Alexandrie is a self-hosted alternative worth a serious look. It is a knowledge base and team wiki that you run on your own hardware, MIT-licensed, free, with no telemetry and no premium tier gating the features that matter.

What Alexandrie actually is

At its centre is a strong Markdown editor — CodeMirror 6 — that handles LaTeX, custom containers, interactive checkboxes, snippets and diagrams natively. You are not fighting a rich-text editor that mangles your formatting; you write Markdown and it renders properly.

• Structure. Content is organised into teams, workspaces and categories, with documents nested inside and protected by a five-level access model. Public share links exist when you do want to share outside.
• Works offline. It installs as a progressive web app (PWA) with synchronisation, so your wiki keeps working on a plane or a flaky connection and catches up later.
• Finds things. Full-text search, a Ctrl+K command overlay, and Kanban boards per workspace.
• Signs people in properly. OpenID Connect for SSO alongside native username/password, so it fits an existing identity setup.
• Backs itself up. Binary files live in S3-compatible storage (a RustFS container ships in the stack; MinIO, Garage or AWS work too), plus ZIP import/export and full-system backup and restore.

Why a business should care

• No per-seat bill that grows with headcount. Adding the new hire should not add a line item. Self-hosted means the cost is fixed — a small server, not a subscription scaled to your team size.
• Your documents stay yours. The wiki runs on your infrastructure. Client notes, internal policies and credentials are not sitting in a third party's database.
• It runs when the vendor doesn't. No price hikes, no feature moved behind a higher tier, no shutting down the product line. You have the code.
• It deploys as one stack. Four Docker Compose services — MySQL, RustFS, a Go backend, a Nuxt frontend — configured through a single .env file. No sprawling setup.

The knowledge is the asset. The tool should not hold it hostage.

Where it fits

For a small business, the honest comparison is this: Notion is faster to start and prettier out of the box; Confluence is what IT already knows. Alexandrie wins when your documents are sensitive, your team is growing, and you would rather own the thing than rent it. It is the difference between storing your files in a rented locker and putting a cabinet in your own office.

Getting started

You need Docker and a single .env file; the UI lands on port 8200 and the API on 8201. A one-person team can have it running in an afternoon. The project is MIT-licensed, funded by GitHub sponsorships, and ships no telemetry.

How Uphill Tech helps

We deploy and manage self-hosted tools like Alexandrie on your own servers — the Docker stack, SSO integration, backups and monitoring handled, so your team gets a wiki that is genuinely yours without becoming your own sysadmin. The first conversation is free.