If you’re a small team looking for a Confluence alternative, the question is usually not whether Confluence works.
It does. For thousands of organizations, some with tens of thousands of employees.
The more useful question is whether all of that is built for a team your size.
For a team of five or ten people, the honest answer is usually no.
Why Confluence feels heavy for a small team
Confluence is built for departments that need to coordinate with other departments. Spaces, permission schemes, page approval flows, a marketplace of add-ons — all of that exists because large organizations need it.
A small team doesn’t have departments. It has a handful of people who need somewhere to write runbooks, onboarding notes, and internal docs, and who’d like that place to stay out of the way.
Instead, someone ends up owning “the Confluence instance” as a side job — managing spaces, permissions, and whichever add-ons crept in over time. For a company of five or ten, that’s a strange amount of overhead for what is, at its core, a shared notebook.
What small teams actually need
Usually something simpler:
- A place to write docs that doesn’t need an administrator to set up or maintain
- Structure — a tree of pages, not a flat list — so things stay findable as the wiki grows
- Search that works and internal links that don’t rot
- A setup one person can do in an afternoon, not a rollout
None of that requires an enterprise platform. It requires a tool that stays out of the way.
Where LeafWiki fits — and where it doesn’t
I run Socradev, a small software consultancy. We looked at Confluence early on for internal docs and client runbooks.
It worked. But for a team our size, most of what it does went unused — and someone still had to own the space setup, the permissions, the add-ons. That overhead is exactly what LeafWiki is built to remove.
To be clear about what LeafWiki isn’t: if your team needs real-time co-editing, multi-step approval workflows across departments, or deep Jira integration, Confluence is still the better tool for that job. That’s not a knock against Confluence — it’s what Confluence is built for, and LeafWiki doesn’t try to compete there.
LeafWiki is built for something narrower: a small team that wants documentation to be simple to write and simple to maintain, without turning “maintaining the wiki” into a part-time job.
Content is Markdown files on disk — readable without the app, backed up with a plain cp -r or synced to your own Git repo. Pages live in a tree, so runbooks and onboarding docs stay organized without a folder-naming convention nobody follows. It’s a single Go binary with SQLite, so there’s no separate database or stack to operate.
LeafWiki Hosted
If your team doesn’t want to run a server at all, that’s what LeafWiki Hosted is for.
A free beta starts in September 2026 — 10 spots, no payment during the beta. Content is still plain Markdown, still exportable, still yours if you ever want to move it elsewhere. After the beta, founding member pricing is $19/month for a team of up to 10 editors — not per user, and viewers don’t count toward that limit.
If a smaller, less administrative alternative to Confluence sounds like what your team has been missing, get a beta spot.
If you’d rather run your own server, LeafWiki is open source and free to self-host. The hosted version is for teams that want the same thing without the infrastructure.