Find your fit
Who it is for
A team that maintains policies, project notes or operating guides can use collections as both topic areas and access boundaries. Documents can nest within one another, so the knowledge base can grow into a structured handbook.
Organizations can choose vendor-hosted Cloud or run an On-Premises edition on their own infrastructure. The $0 Community edition has limited features and no support; paid self-hosted licenses are a separate option.
The work it supports
Core capabilities
Write and refine pages together. Outline describes a Markdown-capable editor, real-time collaborative editing and comments, with document revision history for tracking changes.
Organize information into collections. Teams can group documents by topic or function, nest related pages and use collection access settings to keep selected areas private.
Invite a colleague to a document with view-only or edit rights. Individual and group invitations can be applied alongside collection access, giving a team more precise sharing choices.
Publish selected content to the web when public documentation is intended. Documents or whole collections can receive a public share setting, which should be tested with sample child pages before use.
Find existing guidance with keyword or phrase search across the knowledge base rather than navigating every collection manually.
Understand the offer
Pricing and getting started
Outline Cloud is vendor hosted. Its current pricing page shows $10 per month for 1–10 team members, $79 for 11–100 and $249 for 101–200, with annual pricing also offered. A team that outgrows its member tier moves to the next one automatically.
A Cloud team gets 30 days free. After that, the knowledge base becomes read-only until a payment method is added; the vendor says documents can still be exported during that period.
For On-Premises, Community Edition is listed at $0 with limited features and no support. Business is $4 per user/month billed annually with a 10-user minimum; Enterprise is $5 per user/month billed annually with a 100-user minimum. Infrastructure and operation are separate from those license figures.
The On-Premises comparison places AI answers and guest users in paid Business and Enterprise, not Community. Confirm any edition-specific feature before choosing self-hosting.
Look a little closer
Before you choose
Build a fictional collection and test its default access, a private member invitation and a public share. Publishing a parent document or collection also exposes child documents; admins can disable public sharing at workspace or collection level.
If search-driven answers matter, distinguish ordinary keyword search from AI answers. AI answers require Cloud or a licensed edition and admin enablement, and results are limited by the user’s document permissions.
Try an export of representative pages and images to Markdown or JSON before migrating a large handbook, and inspect whether links, structure and attachments meet the team’s needs.
For self-hosting, check license scope as well as servers, backups and updates. The Community BSL terms prohibit selling, reselling or hosting Outline as a service; a business planning any such use needs a paid-license discussion.
8 distinct sources behind this profile. Research observed Oct 18, 2026. Features and offers can change.
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