Best Self-Hosted Enterprise Wiki Software With AI Capabilities

Most teams start with good intentions. Someone creates a shared Google Doc. Another person sets up a Notion workspace. Before long, your company's knowledge lives in fifteen different places, and nobody can find anything when they actually need it.

That's the problem an enterprise wiki solves. But here's the thing: not every team can store sensitive company data on someone else's servers. If you work in healthcare, finance, government, or any industry where compliance matters, you need an on-premise knowledge base that gives you full control over where your data lives.

And in 2026, you probably want AI built into it too.

So let's talk about what makes a great on-premise enterprise wiki, why AI capabilities are becoming a real requirement, and why Docmost stands out as the best option in this space.

Why On-Premise Still Matters for Your Wiki

The cloud-first movement convinced a lot of companies that hosting your own software was outdated. But the pendulum has been swinging back. Data sovereignty regulations are tightening across the globe. GDPR, HIPAA, ITAR, FedRAMP, and a growing list of industry-specific rules mean that for many organizations, keeping data on infrastructure you control isn't just a preference. It's a legal requirement.

There's also the practical side. When your enterprise wiki and knowledge base run on your own servers, you get full control over uptime, backups, access policies, and network security. You're not at the mercy of a third-party provider's outage or sudden pricing changes.

This became even more urgent recently. Atlassian officially announced the end of life for Confluence Data Center, the product that was the default on-premise wiki for enterprises for over a decade. Starting March 2026, new customers can no longer purchase Confluence Data Center. By March 2029, all existing licenses expire and instances go read-only. For thousands of companies that relied on Confluence for self-hosted documentation, the clock is ticking, and a modern replacement is needed.

Why AI in Your Wiki Actually Matters Now

AI in an enterprise knowledge base isn't a gimmick. When your wiki grows to hundreds or thousands of pages across multiple teams, finding the right information becomes the bottleneck. Traditional keyword search only gets you so far. You have to know the exact words someone used when they wrote the page.

AI changes this in two meaningful ways.

First, AI-powered search understands intent, not just keywords. You can ask a question in natural language and get a direct answer pulled from your existing documentation. Instead of scanning through ten search results, you get the information you need immediately.

Second, AI writing assistance removes friction from the creation side. Teams write more documentation when the tool helps them draft, refine, and translate content on the spot. That means less tribal knowledge stuck in people's heads and more useful pages in your knowledge base.

The catch? Most AI-powered wiki tools run in the cloud and send your data to third-party AI providers. If you're running on-premise for compliance reasons, that defeats the purpose entirely. You need a tool that lets you use AI while keeping everything on your own infrastructure.

Docmost: The Best On-Premise Enterprise Wiki With AI

Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation platform built for teams that need full control over their data. It's self-hosted, it can run in air-gapped environments with no external dependencies, and it comes with genuine AI capabilities that work within your own infrastructure.

Here's what makes it the strongest option for teams looking for an on-premise enterprise wiki with AI.

AI-Powered Search With AI Answers

Docmost includes a feature called AI Answers that brings semantic search to your knowledge base. Instead of relying on keyword matching alone, AI Answers uses vector embeddings to understand the meaning behind your query.

In practice, this means you can open the search dialog, toggle on AI Answers, type a natural language question like "What is our policy on remote work for contractors?", and get an AI-generated answer based on the actual content in your workspace. The AI only searches content you have permission to access, so results are always scoped to the spaces and pages visible to your account.

This is a significant upgrade over traditional wiki search, especially as your knowledge base grows.

Ask AI: Writing Assistance in the Editor

Docmost's Ask AI feature lives directly inside the editor. Select any text and an Ask AI button appears in the toolbar. From there, you can improve writing, fix spelling and grammar, make content longer or shorter, continue writing from where the text ends, get explanations, or generate summaries.

There's also tone adjustment. You can rewrite selected text in a professional, casual, or friendly tone depending on the audience. And for multilingual teams, Ask AI supports translation into eleven languages including English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), and more.

You can also type custom prompts directly in the Ask AI input field to give the AI specific instructions beyond the preset actions. This flexibility means the AI adapts to your workflow rather than forcing you into a rigid set of options.

MCP

Docmost also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows external AI tools and agents to connect directly to your Docmost workspace. Through MCP, an AI assistant like Claude can search, read, create, and update pages in Docmost programmatically. This turns your knowledge base into a live resource that AI workflows can tap into, rather than a static wiki that only humans browse. For teams already using AI-powered development tools or automation pipelines, MCP integration means Docmost can serve as both the source of truth and a working surface for AI agents.

Use Cloud Models or Local LLMs

This is where Docmost really separates itself from cloud-only tools. Since Docmost is self-hosted, you get to choose your AI provider. You can connect to cloud-based models like OpenAI or Google Gemini if your security policy allows it. Or you can run entirely local LLMs through Ollama, keeping every piece of data, every query, and every AI interaction completely on your own servers.

For organizations in regulated industries, this is not a nice-to-have. It's a requirement. Being able to use AI-powered features without sending any data to external services means you can benefit from modern AI without compromising on compliance.

Beyond AI: A Complete Enterprise Knowledge Base

Docmost's AI features sit on top of a platform that already covers everything you need from an enterprise wiki.

The editor supports real-time collaboration. Multiple people can edit the same page simultaneously, with changes synced instantly. The editor handles rich text, tables, callouts, code blocks, math equations with LaTeX, and embeds from tools like Airtable, Loom, and Miro.

For visual documentation, Docmost has built-in support for three diagram tools: Draw.io, Excalidraw, and Mermaid. You can create flowcharts, sequence diagrams, architecture diagrams, and freeform drawings without leaving the page.

Organization is handled through Spaces. Each space can represent a team, project, or department, with its own permissions. You get granular access control with roles for admins, editors, and viewers, plus group management for larger organizations. Pages support nested hierarchies, so you can build deep documentation structures that make sense.

Collaboration features include inline comments and page comments, page history for tracking changes, and attachment uploads. There's also full-text search in attachments, meaning the content inside PDF and DOCX files is searchable alongside your wiki pages. And Docmost provides a REST API for integrations and automation.

For enterprise security, Docmost supports SSO through SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect, and LDAP, plus built-in multi-factor authentication for all user accounts. And for teams migrating from Confluence, there's a dedicated Confluence importer that preserves spaces, page hierarchy, attachments, and formatting.

What About Other On-Premise Wikis?

There are other self-hosted wiki options out there. BookStack is a popular open-source choice with a books-and-chapters metaphor. Outline offers a clean design with real-time collaboration. Both are decent tools for basic documentation needs.

But neither of them offers integrated AI capabilities. No AI-powered search, no writing assistance, no local LLM support. If AI in your knowledge base matters to you, and it should given how much it improves both findability and content creation, these tools simply don't compete in the same category.

With Confluence Data Center being retired, the market is left without a legacy incumbent for on-premise enterprise documentation. Docmost fills that gap with a modern, open-source platform that doesn't just match what Confluence offered but goes beyond it with real AI integration.

The Bottom Line

The best on-premise enterprise wiki is the one your team will actually use. A long feature list means nothing if people go back to messaging documents as email attachments.

That said, the combination of on-premise hosting, real-time collaboration, a modern block-based editor, and real AI capabilities is what separates today's best tools from yesterday's. Your knowledge base should make it easy to capture information, find it later, and keep it up to date without constant manual effort.

For teams evaluating this space right now, Docmost offers the strongest combination of AI features, flexibility, and data control. It's open source. It runs in air-gapped environments. It supports both cloud AI models and fully local LLMs. And it has a built-in Confluence importer for teams that need to migrate.