Modern Confluence Alternative​

Keyboard Shortcuts and Command Palette

If you're writing a lot of documentation, it's important the editor gets out of your way and you can add information quickly. The Papyrs page editor supports many keyboard shortcuts and a Command Palette, making it easy to access and find editing/formatting options without lifting the mouse. Small useful features like fast-linking to pages, pasting images from the clipboard make editing a breeze.

Subsites & Simple Permission Management

You know your permission system has jumped the shark if you need an access level matrix to understand who has access to what. This is not to say having control over permissions isn't important! We just think that if they get too complex they make the system less safe, because it risks having something misconfigured (not to mention it hurts adoption). Confluence is very powerful in that sense, but that can be a huge drawback.

Permissions in Papyrs are flexible yet simple to understand. A Papyrs site is split up into subsites (in Confluence, those would be called Spaces). Each subsite can have its own theming (banner image & colors), menu bar navigation and list of members. A member is either a viewer, editor or admin. If you're not a member, you can't view the pages in a subsite. It's that simple.

By default, a subsite is invite-only, but it's also possible to create subsites which everyone on the site can join. That's very useful for company-wide subsites like a virtual water cooler board or general news and announcements. You can even make a subsite public (our product knowledge base and product blog are examples of this!).

Never miss important updates

Subscribe to notifications on changes to pages you find important. Too much activity? Just switch to daily summary digest emails (or turn them off). A full version history makes it easy to view a visual diff between any two pages versions, as well go back in time and/or roll back changes.

Knowledge Base meets Wiki meets Intranet

Another reason Papyrs makes for a great Confluence alternative is that it combines the best elements from traditional intranets, modern team wikis and knowledge bases. We like how well-suited wikis can be to write documentation, manuals and so on (there's a reason it's the Hawaiian word for quick!). Unfortunately they can be a bit too technical for non-engineering staff, and also aren't designed for things like writing internal news/blog posts with rich media and widgets.

That inevitably leads to not all people using the system, and some information will be shared elsewhere, using a separate intranet portal or word processor. Having all these silos of information and overlapping platforms not only increases costs but also makes a company less productive.

Our aim with Papyrs is to offer the best of both worlds: a system that's suitable for both writing documentation as well as pages with rich media/portals, plenty of features for power users, but easy-to-use for everyone in the organization.