I started Growi with Docker and used it for about a month, so let me list the pros and cons from my personal point of view
These are the facts as of now (v3.7.7), so there is a possibility that they will be addressed in future version upgrades.
Pros
- Markdown editing with real-time preview
- Several people can edit
- Change history management
- Diagram editing with draw.io
- Easy to set up with docker
- Open source
- hackmd integration
- Fast search with elasticsearch
- Authentication features such as LDAP, Google and Github
- Simple presentations with reveal.js built in
Cons
- When a single article contains a lot of images or draw.io diagrams, it previews every one of them, so it becomes slow to respond
- Depending on the version, the integration with hackmd is unstable
- There is no restore button in the change history for going back to a past state
- Exporting and importing data requires the versions to match
- When you import data, the elasticsearch rebuild fails
- Articles cannot be exported as Markdown or PDF
What about running it in the office??
Since draw.io is built in and you can embed things like flowcharts and UML, I found it quite convenient for writing technical articles.
However, with the incompatibility between versions and the way search stops working after an import, running it with several people leaves some worry about being able to keep using it with peace of mind.
In fact, when I upgraded to v3.7.5, articles that were only mine could no longer be viewed or edited because of Forbidden, and once I had imported data, no matter how many version upgrades I applied, elasticsearch kept failing and search became completely impossible, which is fatal.
With this problem happening, going from v3.7.5 to 3.7.7 to 4.0 did not improve anything.
For reasons like these, I wonder whether it is still too unstable to use in the office.
Compared with that, Hugo and Github Pages are managed with GitHub or GitLab, so every article always keeps its version history while being stored, which gives a sense of security — though the drawback of the effort involved, writing frontmatter in hugo, creating the article, compiling it and doing a git push, cannot be wiped away.
So once data compatibility (backward compatibility at the very least) and Elasticsearch become stable, I have no doubt that Growi is an easy-to-use Wiki, so I am looking forward to what comes next!!
Notion after all?
I get the feeling that Notion, which is highly functional and feature-rich and makes up for the drawbacks above, has the edge.
Above all, even a Markdown beginner can easily write clean articles with it, and as an all-in-one information sharing tool that has everything — version history, tasks, calendar and so on — it is highly polished. The flip side of that capability is that a paid plan becomes essential to make full use of it, and that if the number of users grows in the future, limits may be imposed the way Evernote did.