About Outline
Outline is a knowledge base and wiki that teams use to organize internal documents. It is open source and can be used as a hosted cloud service or self-hosted on your own server.
What it does
Outline gives a team a shared workspace with a fast editor, realtime collaboration and comments. Documents can be shared publicly with a link or kept private to a team. Permissions can be set with read and write access, user groups and guest users, so people only see what they need.
Key features
- Realtime collaborative editing
- Markdown support and slash commands
- Search across the whole workspace
- Permissions with user groups and guests
- Slack integration and a built-in MCP server
Who it's for
Outline suits startups and growing companies that need one place for specs, onboarding material and support answers. It also suits teams that want to host their own knowledge base, since the software can run on their own infrastructure.
Pricing and good to know
Outline is open source, so the software itself can be self-hosted at no license cost. The company also offers a cloud hosted version with a 30-day free trial. Self-hosting means you run the server, handle updates and keep backups yourself, while the cloud version takes that work off your hands.
Highlights
- Realtime collaborative editing
- Markdown support and slash commands
- Search across the whole workspace
- Permissions with user groups and guests
- Slack integration and an MCP server
