Outline is praised for its simplicity, performance, and robust features, making it a top choice for team knowledge bases. Users appreciate its web-based nature, responsive UI, and real-time collaboration capabilities. While some note minor formatting challenges and a lack of creative features, the overall experience is positive. The makers of Focus Flow express satisfaction with Outline, highlighting its effectiveness. Many users find it a strong alternative to other platforms, valuing its self-hosting capabilities and seamless integration with other systems.
It is very intuitive, has a good feature set, and just contains all the QOL features you would want. They have great docs (and support self-hosting), PWA support (currently without a full offline mode though), a nice REST API, and it is source available (apparently they plan to go open-source). Just a very nice and versatile app!
What needs improvement
A full offline mode for the PWA.
Simple username password auth (only really relevant if you plan to "abuse" it for personal use)
No E2EE (also only makes sense for personal note taking so not really relevant)
I use Obsidian for note taking and just though I could use that with my friends as well but it turned out to be impractical, we also tried some other apps but none where as good as Outline. Even now I made an Obsidian Plugin to Publish and share personal notes via a private Outline instance.
I'm using this for my team and I've got to say - it's a great alternative to Notion. Although there are a few little formatting challenges, the overall experience has been pleasant! Looking forward to the next upgrade (if there's any!)
We self host outline as our primary wiki and love the simplicity and performance. All relevant features are present and it feels super fast thanks to real time collaboration and integrations into multiple other systems.
Obsidian
Github Pages