The problem is that a lot of people will reach for Gitlab to replace Jira, or MediaWiki/Dokuwiki (or again, Gitlab) to replace Confluence. But for businesses that have adapted business processes to use them, Gitlab/MediaWiki/Dokuwiki simply don't cut the mustard. We have an extensively customized Jira installation that's used for tracking budget requests, cage access tickets, and system change requests--none of those fit into a "bug/task/defect" tracker like Redmine or Github Issues. And for anyone who's gotten a manager using Confluence's editor, moving to writing wiki source in Dokuwiki is a big step backwards.

The thing Atlassian had going for them is that we could get our non-technical people to use their stuff, understand it, and even customize it themselves to meet their needs. I'm not looking forward to trying to bend some other issue-tracking system to do it, so I'm guessing we'll pony up for the DC-class charges (for the few years they continue offering that option) and see if a competitor emerges.

  The thing Atlassian had going for them is that we could get our non-technical people to use their stuff, understand it, and even customize it themselves to meet their needs.

This. Although personally I have never been a big fan of clunky Atlassian products and as a developer would prefer more productive tools, but getting key non-technical stakeholders use the same system as devs teams is a big win.

GitLab pretty much covers BitBucket (code), most of Bamboo (GitLab CI), maybe Jira if you use it only as a basic issue manager (forget about Agile stuff).

Confluence is probably the hardest one. You could use any wiki software but the new "live-editing" stuff (Google Docs style) is pretty good for productivity. Hard to find an on-prem equivalent. Confluence's integration with Jira is hard to compare too.

What agile stuff are you missing from the paid versions of GitLab? We have epics, roadmaps, milestones, and iterations. The only thing that is missing I can think of is workflow enforcement, but that doesn’t strike me as Agile.

Last time I checked I could not modify the fields of an issue (e.g. introduce a random drop-down or a checkbox). Here Jira and TFS were always excellent.

I always go the impression that GitLab was doing excellent in code related workloads but sub-par in issue and test record tracking.

I would be missing the ability to setup customer access, but only give them limited access to tickets and ticket comments.

Or the ability to have different user types paying differently every month.

I really wish MedisWiki was in a state that it could be rolled out as a replacement for Confluence. And in a lot of ways it can be. But sadly a lot of companies go the other way.

If you likes gitlab and look for better planning capabilities you can have a look at Tuleap [1].

Tuleap shines with very advanced tracking capabilities and, most important, empower end users to manage it. Unlike Jira, you don't depend on a central admin to tweak you configuration, everything is at hand.

Git & CI capabilities are built-in but if you prefer gitlab for that, you will have soon an integration between the 2 tools. It's part of the next delivery [2] due mid november.

[1] https://www.tuleap.org [2] https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101&plan...

Most of the places I know of or where friend's work use Atlassian. I am wondering if this will drive a shift towards GitLab considering the general consensus I've heard is that GitHub Enterprise is too expensive.

Nextcloud Hub is a fairly good option, and has components/integrations to support many business activities.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-20-debuts-dashboard...

- federated file sharing

- real-time collaboration (e.g. via OnlyOffice or Collabora)

- calendars

- video conferencing

- kanban

- webmail

- webhooks and push notifications

- discussions and mailing lists via Discourse

- Matrix/Element, Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat, IRC, and Slack integration

- Github and GitLab integration

- help desk via Zammand

Nextcloud is not without shortcomings. But, it's strengths are being federated, open-source, and integrated with an exosystem of open-source community and productivity tools.

One additional note, our small cooperative uses a managed version of Nextcloud from Web Hosting. The cost starts at $35/month for fully managed or $7/month to update Nextcloud manually via the settings page (which is surprisingly simple). The Web Hosting Web page and sign-up process are slightly klunky, but their customer care has been excellent in my experience.

https://webo.hosting/

I wish there were better self-hosted wikis. Most seem to be from the mid-00s and rock the look. None of them have real-time collaborative editing like Confluence or Quip from my research.

We're working on a CRDT collaboration engine at Outline-Wiki https://www.getoutline.com. It can be easily and performantly self-hosted (though there's a saas version available) and it's open-source.

Fair warning that it is under the Business Source License which isn't really open-source. I fully understand why this license was chosen (preventing resellers competing with your SaaS), but advertising as "open-source" is misleading.

Your FAQ also says to "Contact [You]" regarding on-prem instead of pointing to the GitHub, which imo conceals the fact that you can build and run it without a restrictive license.

I have used openkb for a while.

Its fast, lightweight and MIT licensed.

https://github.com/mrvautin/openKB

Wiki.js seems to be up and coming in this space. It’s not full featured yet, but it feels like working with a modern web application, rather than a bunch of PHP. No real time collaboration though.

I created and maintain BookStack which is often used for many similar use-cases as confluence: https://www.bookstackapp.com/

Rather opinionated in design and structure though.

It's great for things like blog posts, but not so great for technical documentation. Tables are the key. Also if it had DocuWiki/MediaWiki import tools and PDF/ePub export for print and screen reading it would have been perfect. Markdown doesn't cut it if you have tables, the DocuWiki format seems to be better suited for that but also a lot more annoying for source editing regular stuff and a nuisance for non technical people. We have online docs on DocuWiki. At least we have the option to use Pandoc to convert to printable formats. The thing is that our whole instance looks like a 00s web 1.0 website and it's not searchable. I'm always annoyed when looking for something on it. Your BookStack web app is miles ahead in this regard. I love the chapter collapses.

Phabricator is pretty good and is open source

https://phacility.com/phabricator/

Some big organizations are using it (like Facebook, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla)

Also wanted to write about Phabricator / Phacility as it looks really neat.

Does anyone have a first hand experience working with it comparing to standard Atlassian stack?

This looks fantastic. A very deep product. I appreciate the copy "Like Slack, but nowhere as good."

Another option for Wiki, which I think is a bit closer to Confluence (but open source & self hosted) would be XWiki https://www.xwiki.org/

Take a look at Documize [1] -- it might help you in place of Confluence.

(It's my start-up.)

[1] https://www.documize.com

> For Confluence, I think of Media Wiki.

Having used and looked inside both Media Wiki and its enterprise fork BlueSpice, I can't really recommend either if you need anything more serious than just "minimum viable wiki features".

A few years back we temporarily switched from using Confluence to Xwiki, which worked okay for a while, but then different small and medium issues kept adding up until we had to go back to Confluence and swallow the increased price (sixfold in a span of 3 or so years). This was with Xwiki 8 though, the current version 12 might have improved things, I should try it again really.

What issues made you switch back specifically?

If you look for a full featured approach I would recommend that you look at Tuleap[1] and esp. how it maps with Atlassian suite [2].

[1] https://www.tuleap.org [2] https://blog.tuleap.org/tuleap-versus-jira-software/

(Disclaimer: I'm from the dev team)

One alternative to JIRA Service Desk is Deskpro https://www.deskpro.com/on-premise-download/ - we continue to invest heavily in our On-Premise product.

Disclaimer, I am CEO

For issue tracking I like https://mantisbt.org

Self-hosted gitlab could probably get you some variation of all of these.

BitBuket + Bamboo can be replaced with GitLab. For the wiki, have a look at DokuWiki.