Outline

About

Outline is a team knowledge base: a place to write down how things work, from onboarding guides to runbooks, and then actually find them again. It is aimed at companies and teams who want something quicker and tidier than a sprawling shared drive, and who may want to run it on their own servers rather than hand their documents to someone else. What people love is the editor. It is fast, Markdown-friendly, driven by slash commands, and several people can edit the same page in real time with comments and threads alongside. Outline is made by General Outline, Inc., a small company in New York founded by Tom Moor, and it has been developed in the open on GitHub for about ten years, where it has gathered roughly 41,000 stars. The code is published under the Business Source License 1.1: you can read it and self-host it for your own team, and each release converts to the Apache 2.0 licence after a few years, but you cannot resell it as a hosted document service. Outline says more than 2,000 customers pay for it. Highlights: • Markdown editor with slash commands, templates and interactive embeds from Figma, Loom and more • Real-time collaborative editing, comments, threads and @mentions • Fast workspace-wide search plus AI answers drawn from your own documents • Built-in MCP server so assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can search and edit docs • Groups, read/write permissions, guest users and public share links • Slack integration for searching, sharing and asking questions from chat • Custom domains and branding, API and webhooks, SSO and an audit log • Right-to-left text support and an interface in about 20 languages The hosted cloud version has a 30-day free trial, then costs US$10 a month for up to 10 users, US$79 a month for 11 to 100 users and US$249 a month for 101 to 200, with a 30% discount for non-profits and schools. If you self-host, the Community Edition is free without support, while the Business (US$4 per user per month, 10-user minimum) and Enterprise (US$5, 100-user minimum) licences add AI answers, SAML and more, billed yearly. Outline runs in the browser, as a Docker image on your own server, and as a desktop app for macOS and Windows.

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