Outline

Your company's knowledge, off the per-user meter

Notion and Confluence charge for every person who can read your own documentation, so the price of writing things down grows with headcount forever. Outline is the open source alternative: a fast, genuinely pleasant team wiki with real-time editing and search that works, running on your own infrastructure with no per-user fees. Node deploys, manages and supports Outline as a production service hosted in the UK.

What Outline is

Outline is an open source knowledge base and team wiki. Documents are written in a clean markdown editor with slash commands, embeds and real-time collaboration, then organised into nested collections so knowledge has a home: engineering runbooks, HR policies, sales playbooks, meeting notes, onboarding guides. Search is fast and accurate, which matters more than any other feature in a wiki, because a knowledge base no one can search is a graveyard.

Permissions work the way organisations do. Collections can be open to everyone, restricted to a team, or private, and documents can be shared publicly when you want a page to double as external documentation. Integrations connect Outline to the tools where work happens, including Slack, so answers surface where questions are asked.

Outline is self-hostable with its source code open for inspection, which is exactly what lets Node run it for you on UK infrastructure: your institutional knowledge, the most valuable document set your company owns, stays on systems you control.

Why self-hosted Outline instead of Notion or Confluence

No per-user fees: Notion and Confluence both price per user per month, at the time of writing around 10 US dollars a seat for the tiers businesses actually need. A wiki only works if everyone can read and write it, so the per-seat model taxes the very adoption that makes it useful. Self-hosted Outline adds users for free.

UK data residency: your strategy documents, HR policies and technical runbooks stay on UK infrastructure under an Article 28 data processing agreement, not in a US vendor's cloud.

Speed as a feature: Outline is noticeably fast, and Confluence in particular is noticeably not. A wiki that opens instantly gets written in; one that grinds gets abandoned for scattered Google Docs.

No lock-in: documents are markdown underneath and export cleanly, in bulk, at any time. Compare that with prising years of content out of Confluence.

A wiki, not an everything-app: Notion sprawls into databases, projects and dashboards. Outline does one job, company knowledge, and does it with less to configure, less to govern and less to go wrong.

Writing and finding, done properly

The editor is the reason teams stick with Outline. Markdown shortcuts and slash commands keep hands on the keyboard, real-time collaboration means two people can edit the same doc without conflict, and comments keep review where the content is. Document history tracks every revision, so nothing is ever really lost. On the reading side, full-text search returns answers rather than lists, collections and backlinks give structure without bureaucracy, and public sharing turns any page into lightweight external documentation when you need it.

Outline or BookStack?

We run both of the leading open source knowledge bases. Outline suits the everyday team wiki: freeform, fast, collaborative, the place where meeting notes, policies and how-tos accumulate. BookStack is the documentation-first alternative, with an enforced books, chapters and pages hierarchy that suits manuals, formal procedures and structured reference material. Plenty of organisations run one; some run both for different audiences. We will advise honestly on which fits how your teams write.

Keycloak and single sign-on

Outline is built around single sign-on, which makes it a natural fit for the way Node tenants work. Every application in a Node tenant joins your own Keycloak realm, so staff sign in once with corporate credentials and use Outline alongside every other app we run for you. Admins grant and revoke access centrally, MFA and session policies apply consistently, and leavers lose access to company knowledge the moment they are removed from your identity system. It is one of the ways the Node platform turns a collection of apps into a coherent workspace.

How Node runs Outline for you

We operate Outline as a fully managed service, not a server you have to babysit.

Deployment: we deploy Outline in a production configuration with a proper database, object storage for attachments, TLS on your own domain and SSO connected from day one.

Upgrades and maintenance: we test and apply updates, manage migrations and keep your instance current and secure without disrupting your team's writing.

Monitoring and support: we monitor availability and performance, take regular backups of documents and attachments, and our team is on hand when you need changes or help.

Your infrastructure or ours: hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, on-premises or in your cloud accounts, with the same managed service either way.