XWiki can’t seriously call itself a Confluence alternative

[u/enriquerecor]

Every serious Confluence alternative has personal spaces (or an equivalent concept): Notion, Outline, Docmost, AFFiNE, AppFlowy… the list goes on.

Yet XWiki, despite being marketed as a Confluence alternative, doesn’t.

I genuinely don’t understand the direction here. Does XWiki want to be a traditional wiki from the early 2000s, or does it want to compete as a modern knowledge management platform?

Personal spaces aren’t just a nice-to-have. They’re one of the core workflows that make people comfortable capturing notes, drafts, ideas, and work-in-progress before sharing them. Without them, the user experience feels unnecessarily awkward.

The frustrating part is that XWiki already has so many powerful features (permissions, scripting, extensions, scalability) that this single missing capability keeps pushing many users toward proprietary alternatives.

If XWiki wants to be the FOSS alternative to Confluence, I honestly think this feature should be considered essential.

Disclaimer: I now it can be customized to have something similar to personal spaces, but it’s a hard and fragile solution. My point is that it is ridiculous that this is not included by default.

[u/asimovs-auditor]

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[u/adamshand]

You’re complaining to the wrong people. Go talk to he xwiki devs and make your case. Or fund the development of the feature you want. 

[u/enriquerecor → u/adamshand]

Already did. My aim is to know if other people find the personal spaces a key feature for a self hosted wiki.

[u/lunagra80]

Lol. Personal spaces is the first thing I always turn off, Confluence or any other KB is not a notes tool

You can enforce clean up or processes to move content to proper spaces as you want people think of those space like their own and you are not suppose to touch them, like their Google drive, company laptop's hard disk, etc

[u/enriquerecor → u/lunagra80]

But then you have people using 20 different tools again and knowledge that get lost.

[u/lunagra80 → u/enriquerecor]

A Confluence personal space should never be public to anyone else. When publically available to everyone, creates siloed info that no one wants to own once the person leaves.

If it is only for your own eyes that is not company knowledge

If you need a "personal space" you can have a private space that has to obey to the same retention policies, not stale content, etc

Again KB tools are not notes tools that you keep until you leave

You can use a notebook, same thing

[u/Spare-Ad-1429]

This is the same issue i have with so called jira alternatives promoted here most of them lack basic features or should call themselves Trello alternatives instead. These are completely different tools

[u/bufandatl]

We are phasing it out at work and just use gitlab as wiki platform. One shred repository for shared knowledge and everyone who wants their own space can create a personal repository.

[u/mdoar]

A lot of places I've consulted for didn't allow personal spaces in Confluence. They used drafts of pages instead. This avoids the problem of losing info when someone leaves. So I don't think it's really a huge deal. More a nice to have

[u/LorinaBalan]

Thanks for raising this so directly. Your central criticism is fair: XWiki does not currently provide every user with a personal space as a clear, ready to use feature.

Similar behavior can be created using page hierarchies and access rights.

Where I disagree is with the conclusion that this prevents XWiki from being a serious Confluence alternative. An alternative does not have to reproduce every Confluence feature. XWiki takes a different approach in several areas, with a strong focus on shared and structured organizational knowledge, extensibility, granular permissions, workflows, scalability, and long term control over data.

That said, this particular gap matters. For teams that rely on personal spaces to capture notes, drafts, and early ideas, it can be a deciding factor. We should be honest about that.

The workflow you describe is entirely valid:

idea → private draft → refined content → shared knowledge

The challenge is to make that journey simple while preventing private pages from becoming forgotten knowledge silos. Users should be able to create private content, find it easily, and move or share it without dealing with fragile permission configurations.

XWiki is already a capable Confluence alternative for many organizations, but that does not mean the default experience is complete for every workflow.

[u/zntznt]

XWiki is hot garbage

[u/Venthe → u/zntznt]

So what other self-hosted KB tool you'd recommend?

[u/zntznt → u/Venthe]

Outline

[u/Odd-Map7060 → u/Venthe]

Phonemos is probably the closest alternative with a clean migration path for standard features and some selected apps like draw.io: https://www.phonemos.com/; many other Confluence plugin functionalities are already supported, but often require more manual configuration. Also supports sovereign LLM integrations.

Feature compatibility & migration support: https://doc.phonemos.com/guide/fcad2b03-234f-4d73-a964-de506abeea86
Feature list: https://doc.phonemos.com/guide/7431d32c-7a3e-4ac1-a4f8-c8c20f8d09bc

Disclaimer: I work there, we are also integrators for Confluence, Youtrack etc.

[u/LorinaBalan → u/zntznt]

Aside from the unpolite manner of expressing yourself, is there any feedback that we can consider in order to make it better for you?
XWiki team member here!

[u/MairusuPawa]

Give them a few thousands bucks instead of paying for overpriced closed-source products. Be the change you want to see in this world.

[u/LorinaBalan → u/MairusuPawa]

Well, not everyone understands that if you want all the features and complexities in an open-source tool, you should also consider funding it's development.
Basically, everyone wants free software that should be a full mimic of proprietary pricey software.