Proprietary Wiki Engine

Proprietary wiki engines are typically closed-source, use a user-count pricing model, and are increasingly being offered on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis. They differentiate themselves from their open source cousins but placing greater focus on the tenets of authoring delight and embedding and blending—by offering the capability of embedding content from a variety of sources. Most recently, vendors are also concentrating on the tenet of contemporary prompt, unsurprisingly, given the current AI boom.

The most popular proprietary wiki engines include:

DocOps Automation

All proprietary wiki engines provide APIs which allow the programmatic manipulation of documentation. Atlassian Confluence is the most capable of advanced DocOps use cases given that it even provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to deploy and run custom plug-ins. All the others, at the time of writing, allow API-based interaction only.

Limitations

Given that most commercial wiki engines operate as black boxes—in their modern SaaS incarnations—accessing the underlying database directly (or reading/writing a document file in one of their accessible directories) are options that are off the table.

While commercial wiki engines often offer superior authoring delight, this is not true for the DocOps engineer persona. The underlying document encoding formats tend to be opaque and hard to convert to and from standard formats.