Comparison
Dossiers vs Confluence
The enterprise wiki standard — versus specs-as-code with review built in.
Confluence is where a huge share of the world’s institutional knowledge lives, and for good reasons: real-time co-editing, granular permissions, deep Jira integration, and an editor anyone in the company can use. As a general team wiki, it’s the safe, proven pick.
Specifications ask for something a wiki deliberately doesn’t provide: a gate between “draft” and “published”. Confluence pages go live the moment someone saves; approval workflows are plugins bolted on top. Dossiers makes the gate the core of the model — a spec changes only when a pull request is reviewed and merged, every revision is in Git history, and readers always see a clean, read-only view of the current state. And because everything is plain Markdown in your repository, there’s no export project waiting for you if you ever leave.
At a glance
| Dossiers | Confluence | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | CLI: free (MIT). Hosted service: TBD — free tier planned | Free up to 10 users; Standard ~$6/user/mo; Premium ~$12/user/mo |
| Open source | Yes — MIT | No — proprietary |
| Where content lives | Markdown files in your Git repository | Atlassian's cloud (Data Center for large enterprises) |
| Authoring | Any editor or IDE; plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter | Rich WYSIWYG editor with real-time co-editing |
| Review & approval | Pull requests — drafts appear automatically next to published specs | Inline comments; pages publish on save — approval gates need add-ons |
| Version history | Full Git history of every document | Per-page version history |
| Full-text search | Full-text search in the hosted service; static builds use browser search | Yes — built in |
| Access control | Google Workspace domain or GitHub org (hosted); static sites can sit behind your own auth | Granular per-space and per-page permissions |
| Self-hosting | Yes — static output hosts anywhere, or run the CLI server | Data Center only — enterprise-scale licensing |
| Lock-in | None — plain Markdown files stay in your repo | High — exports are HTML/XML/PDF; Markdown fidelity varies |
Prices are rounded list prices as of July 2026 and change often — always check the vendor’s pricing page. Dossiers hosted-service pricing will be announced at launch.
Which one is for you?
Choose Confluence if…
- The whole company — including non-technical teams — authors content
- You need deep Jira integration and the Atlassian ecosystem
- Real-time co-editing during meetings is part of how you write
- You rely on fine-grained page-level permissions
Choose Dossiers if…
- Specs should be reviewed before they’re published, not after
- Your authors already live in Git and pull requests
- You want your documents portable — plain files, no export project
- A wiki’s per-user pricing doesn’t fit a read-mostly spec library
The bottom line
Keep Confluence for what wikis are good at — meeting notes, team pages, evolving knowledge. Move the documents that must be deliberate — specs, RFCs, policies, ADRs — into Git with Dossiers, where changes are reviewed like code and history is never lost.
Frequently asked questions
Can we migrate existing Confluence pages?
There’s no one-click path — Confluence’s export formats need conversion to Markdown (community tools help). Most teams migrate incrementally: new specs start in Dossiers, and old pages move when they’re next revised.
Can Dossiers and Confluence coexist?
Very well. A common split: Confluence for team spaces and notes, Dossiers for the canonical spec library, with links between the two.
Where do discussions happen without page comments?
In pull requests — inline, threaded, and permanently attached to the exact change being discussed. The conversation becomes part of the record.
See it with your own specs
Point Dossiers at a folder of Markdown files — you'll have a site before the kettle boils.