Question 1

What is a Confluence alternative?

Accepted Answer

Anything that can hold a company's documentation and let people find it again. That takes in the other platforms on this hub, meaning Notion, Document360 and Guru, the shared drive full of loose documents that a surprising number of businesses still rely on, and open source systems such as Frappe Wiki. The first question worth answering is whether your seat count holds steady from month to month.

Question 2

How is Cascadia different from Confluence?

Accepted Answer

Confluence is a licensed platform you buy seats in and extend with apps. Cascadia is a wiki somebody builds for you. We shape spaces, permissions, the review chain and search around the documentation you already have, host it on Frappe Cloud and look after it afterwards. The price is one figure for the company.

Question 3

What does Confluence actually cost?

Accepted Answer

We are not going to quote you a figure, because Atlassian does not publish one you can rely on. Confluence Cloud is priced per user on progressive volume bands, so the rate depends on how many seats you hold, and the published rates render only inside their own calculator. What Atlassian does document plainly is the billing rule, and that is the part that decides what you pay. Cascadia is five hundred dollars a month for Standard and a thousand for Priority, at any headcount.

Question 4

Is Confluence cheaper than this?

Accepted Answer

On licence alone, for a small and stable team, almost certainly yes, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A handful of users on Confluence Cloud costs a fraction of five hundred a month. The comparison only turns once the seat count is large, or swings about, or is carrying several per user Marketplace apps beside it.

Question 5

Is Frappe Wiki as capable as Confluence?

Accepted Answer

No, and it is the plainest limit on this page. Confluence has two decades of macros, templates, permission depth and a Marketplace behind it, and Frappe Wiki has none of that. What Frappe Wiki gives you instead is a structure you control, source you can read, and a bill that does not move when your headcount does.

Question 6

Why not install Frappe Wiki and run it ourselves?

Accepted Answer

You can, and there is no licence to buy. Standing it up is quick. What takes the time is deciding how spaces map to teams, who approves a change, which of your existing restrictions to carry across, and what to do about every page built on a macro. None of that is in the documentation.

Question 7

Should we buy this at all?

Accepted Answer

Often not. If your team lives in Jira and Confluence is where the tickets and the documentation meet, moving the documentation away from that is usually a downgrade. The fit review exists to reach that answer honestly and it costs nothing.

Question 8

Can we just stay on Confluence's free plan?

Accepted Answer

Up to ten users, yes, and it is a real plan rather than a teaser. What you get is two gigabytes of storage and community support, which means a forum rather than a person. The eleventh user is where the decision arrives, and it tends to arrive all at once.

Question 9

Do we have to migrate everything at once?

Accepted Answer

No, and staging it is usually the better idea. The spaces people open weekly cross first, because those are what somebody needs on Monday morning. Archived spaces, attachments and the long tail nobody has touched since last year follow at whatever pace suits.

Question 10

Does anything break while you take over?

Accepted Answer

No. Nobody loses a page they are working in and internal links keep resolving. We migrate into a copy, and the cut across waits until the page counts match on both sides and every macro has either been rebuilt or written down.

Question 11

What if we already run Frappe Wiki and it was set up badly?

Accepted Answer

It happens more often than you would expect, and the work is a rebuild rather than a tidy up. We read the space structure, the navigation, the permission model, the revision history and whatever anybody customized, then say which of it should stand and which should be built again.

Question 12

Do you own the system or the data?

Accepted Answer

You do, on both counts. Frappe Wiki is open source, the instance and the database sit in your name, and the spaces, templates and custom fields we build are yours as well. If you stopped paying us tomorrow nothing would expire and nothing would turn read only.

Question 13

What is included at each tier?

Accepted Answer

Standard buys implementation, configuration, data migration, handover, customization, development work, Frappe Cloud hosting and support that does not stop. Priority adds a second concurrent request, quicker turnaround and a quarterly review. Neither tier meters seats, spaces or logins.

Question 14

Most of our people would only ever read the wiki. Does that matter?

Accepted Answer

It is most of the argument of this page. A per user licence charges the same for the engineer who wrote the runbook and the ninety people who read it once. On an instance you own a reader is a login, and adding one costs nothing at all.

Question 15

What does the monthly report actually contain?

Accepted Answer

The changes that month, what we built or configured, anything that still looks fragile and what we plan to do about it. Upstream Frappe Wiki release notes that will affect you go in too. The month runs from your start date rather than the calendar.

Question 16

What if I want to leave?

Accepted Answer

Thirty days notice, and there is nothing to disentangle. You already hold the instance, the database and the configuration, so nothing needs exporting and no licence needs transferring. What ends is our involvement.

A Confluence Alternative Whose Bill Does Not Follow Your Peak Headcount

The monthly bill follows your busiest day, not your average one

The apps that make it fit are a second subscription

The self hosted way out has a date printed on it

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

One monthly figure that does not change when the team grows

No peak seat count from one busy week setting the whole month

No marketplace subscription needed before the wiki fits your process

No published end of life date on the self hosted deployment option

A named engineer from month one rather than a support tier you upgrade into

The person who built the approval workflow is the person who answers about it

Source you can read, change and keep running long after we are gone

One database holding the document, the project and the customer record together

A deployment that can move on premise if a policy ever asks it to

A fit review that costs nothing and can end with us pointing you at them

Where Confluence fits

Where the peak seat rule starts to hurt

Where Confluence is strong

What a flat five hundred a month covers once the seat count stops moving the bill

What the first sixty days look like when years of spaces have to come across

We read the space tree before we open the software

Pages cross over and reconcile before anyone is asked to trust them

Only the restrictions you actually rely on get rebuilt

One full publish cycle runs before we step back

Don't Take Our Word For It

A hiring spike in one week set the price of the whole month

The apps cost more than the wiki and nobody had added them up

Dollars a month, flat, at ten seats or five hundred and every peak between

Dollars of software licence, and no per user charge sitting above it

Weeks before a real draft, review and publish run end to end

Confluence alternative and managed Frappe Wiki FAQs

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