Those hosted media wikis aren’t free though. That’s the big difference. Spending $60/year on media wiki hosting is an avoidable expense and confluence costs nothing until you have 10 people.
I’m not saying it’s 100% of startups, but unless you have a good reason not to, I think confluence is the right choice.
yea, hosted-mediawiki was my immediate thought. cheap or free, basically the same kind of permissions/etc as any other.
and 100% agreed, self-hosting is usually not a good choice for a small company, and cost is basically not an issue beyond ~10+.
Notion is an interesting one. I wouldn't personally call it a wiki, but I can kinda see why some would. but the performance and cost and and etc combined with feature-lock-in that Notion has would put it pretty far down the list for me too (though probably still well above confluence), and possibly completely rule it out (which confluence avoids).
There are companies that offer mediawiki as a SASS app. You can self-host if you want but you by no means have to.
I'd agree that most startups probably dont want to bother with doing their own setup as they have more important things to focus on.
[Disclaimer, im a mediawiki dev]