Having a team knowledge base has numerous benefits. From collaboration to goal alignment, and seamless onboarding, a body of knowledge improves effectiveness and productivity.

But that is why you’re here, right? To get the right knowledge base for your team…

To help you decide if a Confluence alternative, ProWiki, can fit your team’s knowledge base needs. Let’s rip them apart and allow you to decide better.

Overview of Confluence

Confluence has been on since 2004 and is one of the most popular wikis for businesses.

It solves the problem of internal documentation for teams with its varying features, its WYSIWYG editor, and its excellent integration with Atlassian products like Jira and Bitbucket.

ProWiki Overview

A group of wiki veterans created ProWiki to streamline knowledge sharing and collaboration for teams.

Powered by the software that Wikipedia runs on, MediaWiki, it allows for storing a vast amount of open-ended information.

It packs a powerful search functionality to find information easily and has over 100 extensions. It is a wiki hosting software with pricing designed for team growth.

Confluence or ProWiki. Which is Better?

The never-ending debate of comparing one product to another.

The true answer lies in what’s required by you and your team. Both products pack powerful benefits. Understanding your team's needs in comparison with what each software provides would help you decide what knowledge base to choose from.

So, let’s dive in on core benefits you would find handy.

Getting you through

No doubt, customer success is one of the most important drivers of software products. Even the most “intuitive” products need some getting used to. Without it, the best product can become, well, irritating.

Confluence has evolved into a modern knowledge base with a ton of features. For this reason, it has a high learning curve for average users to get started and understand it.

Confluence does offer some form of support to reduce this. But, to get their better, top-tier support, you’ll need to upgrade your pricing.

“It is difficult to navigate as some users complain that confluence is difficult to learn right away.” 5-star reviewer. Source

“Honestly, so confusing that I avoid it at all costs.” 1-star reviewer. Source

“Most irritating product you can ever use with zero support” 1-star reviewer. Source

For ProWiki, setting up is by filling out four forms. After providing the information requested, your team knowledge base displays automatically. This whole process takes about three minutes.

ProWiki using the MediaWiki software is managed for you by a team of 13-year wiki veterans. Support is also provided for all paid tiers, but priority support is only offered to Enterprise plans.

Ease in accessing information

That’s how a knowledge base should be. Quick and easy to find information.

Confluence is efficient in searching for information. Searching involves using keywords and filters. With more information stored in your knowledge base, however, this search functionality may become difficult and time-consuming to find information.

“Sometimes, searching for a specific document or topic is not as easy as you may think. I have had times when I need to use over 5 keywords to finally find what I was looking for, which can be time-consuming.” 5-star reviewer. Source

Instead, ProWiki uses dynamic keyword search and has an auto-complete feature allowing you to find resources and documentation faster and with a click.

Pricing

Confluence has a forever free plan with limited features, and its paid plan starts at €5.7 ($5.5) per user.

For its Enterprise plan, which includes its full-service support, the fee starts at over €40,000 ($39,000) per year.

ProWiki pricing comes with your team’s growth in mind. All fees include unlimited users, allowing you to not bother about the increasing charges that come with every new member joining your team.

Pricing starts at €33 ($32) per month for the Basic plan for unlimited users and ends at €448 ($437) per month for unlimited users for the Enterprise plan.

Editing

Both Confluence and ProWiki use the WYSIWYG editor. Important formatting options like bullet points, bold and italics, and find and replace features are available for styling.

The difference is in their templates and editing functionality.

Confluence allows custom or page templates where you can save an initial template for a doc, and upload it later on other documents.

ProWiki, alternatively, has skins/themes, templates, and Lua modules. Like Confluence, you can select a particular template or skins to work with, and the Lua modules enable project structuring and reusable library code.

Another important distinction for technical teams is the use of wikitext. Confluence does not allow wikitext support, while ProWiki does.

But then again, not everyone understands the wiki markup and Confluence editing features are more user-friendly for the average team member.

Data Analysis and Reporting

Confluence data analysis and reporting allow you to see your website’s and pages' performance and how active users are. This gives you insights into the engagement of content on your website.

On the other hand, ProWiki has powerful extensions for analysis and reporting like the Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase. You can store and query data, add structured data to pages, and find relationships between pages and attribute page values.

More features include the use of visualisations, insights on user activity, changes to pages and activity on pages to enable you to control the quality of your processes and get clarity - beneficial for your decision-making.

Collaboration

Collaboration in Confluence is fair as you can comment on documents and share reports with your team. It boosts this feature with its seamless integration with Jira and Bitbucket which are more suited for collaboration and project management.

In ProWiki, communication is documented automatically in chats so information can be reused and picked up when required by any member of the team.

With ProWiki too, you can take meeting notes, create tasks and assign them to members (also integrate them to calendars and notify members), prioritize work, and have an avenue to refine your team’s cooperation as needed.

Comparison summarized image

The Bottomline?

You can choose Confluence if you

Start with ProWiki if you require a

Hope this helps simplify your decision journey.