BookStack is fantastic for having business users and not-so-technically-savvy IT users. It enables them to create a documentation they like in a visual way while still forcing them to adhere to logical structure of a document. It works fine even for more technical matters such as integration guidelines, especially when these concern some of the more obscure technologies. The exported docs are presentable but lack any interactivity. Where it lacks is generating heavily technical documentations. Heavier REST or GraphQL integrations should for example be documented through other means. As for developer documentations, there are definitely more suitable alternatives, also.
Notion is good for a plethora of use cases. The templates that it offers give just a few established pages for common uses but these are some of my favorites:
Kanban board: we use it a lot in my company to manage tasks and meetings
Note taking: whether in a professional or academic environment, Notion is well suited to take notes of everything regardless.
Software documentation: the "code" component to insert code snippets is perfect for creating tutorials and documentation for software development.
Finance control: I use the "my finances" template to have a proper following of my monthly transactions, which allowed me to be more responsible with my money.
Inventory management: Since I own multiple peripherals and general equipment, being able to have a portable inventory of all of it that includes their original value, warranty length and current state has been perfect to know when clean, maintain or straight up replace everything.
Team Collaboration. In Notion's software is the ability to see precisely who is working on a project and where. This eliminates any confusion when on calls or when working on the same project simultaneously. It is easy to tag co-workers to precise moments and build conversation streams.
Text Coding. When transitioning text from our Notion ideation and drafting boards to our website backends, the coding holds on all of the text.
Organization. Whether it's utilizing a "pin board" set up or nestling pages within pages, it is possible to keep everything organized and easy to find for every member of your team.
The increase in integrations with third parties will always promote the adoption of the platform in companies.
Personalization with logos and corporate colors sometimes makes the difference when selecting a tool in a corporation.
Having multiple functionalities for working in manufacturing companies and with devices developed by third parties encourages other companies to select Notion as their flagship tool to offer implementation packages under alliances that favor its use.
Confluence, having only a slight advantage in terms of features compared to BookStack, really only makes sense to procure as a part of the Jira bundle. It requires much more maintenance from my experience and does not really deliver any extra value aside from the very strict certifications like HIPAA. DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP. As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.
Trello only has the Kanban board feature and is great for task management, while Notion has a vast array of features, is easier to use, and has a more visually-appealing interface. I choose to use Notion over Trello due to its increased versatility and greater customization capabilities.
Spillover within Business IT staff up, nearly double substitutability. This is through the ability of a support technician servicing a different product to find a guide describing how to solve the more frequent issues the way a product lead would do it.
Time to draft and publish a documentation down some 20% compared to previous solution.
OpenSource that integrates fine with enterprise-grade software and somehow even passes security audit. 20 times cheaper to implement compared to Confluence, almost free to maintain.
