If your team's docs live in a wiki that's slowly drifting out of date, you've probably looked at both of these. Outline and Slite actually list each other as alternatives in their own product data — they're solving the same problem (a team knowledge base that doesn't rot) from two different directions. One bets on speed and self-hosting; the other bets on an AI agent that watches your other tools and flags docs before they go stale.
Outline: the fast, self-hostable editor
Outline is built around being the fastest markdown editor in its class, with real-time collaboration, AI-powered search and Q&A over your own docs, and a Slack integration. The standout feature is that you can self-host it via Docker under the BSL 1.1 license, so teams that don't want their docs locked into someone else's cloud have a real option.
Pricing: Freemium — self-hosted is free, hosted cloud is paid with a 30-day trial.
Forces: fastest editor in its class, AI search over your own content, genuinely self-hostable.
Limites: it's docs-only — no databases, no kanban boards, no project-management layer like Notion has — and the BSL license restricts reselling or building a competing hosted product on top of it.
Slite: the AI agent that notices when docs go stale
Slite takes a different bet: an AI agent watches your connected tools (Slack, Jira, GitHub and more) for changes, and drafts an update to the relevant doc before it goes stale — instead of waiting for a human to remember. It also ships migration tools from Notion, Confluence, ClickUp, Quip and OneNote, and cross-tool search across 8+ integrations.
Pricing: Basic $10/user/month billed annually (30 AI questions/month, 5GB), Pro $20/user/month (Slite Agent, cross-tool search, 50 credits/month, 10GB), Enterprise on request.
Forces: proactive drift detection instead of manual upkeep, strong migration tooling for teams leaving Notion or Confluence, unlimited docs even on the Basic plan.
Limites: per-user pricing adds up fast on a large team, the Basic plan's 30 AI questions/month is a tight limit, and it's overkill for a small team where manual updates were never really a problem. It's also less integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem than Confluence for teams already living there.
Side-by-side
| Outline | Slite | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Freemium, self-hosted free | Per-user, $10–20/mo |
| Self-hosting | Yes (Docker, BSL 1.1) | No, cloud only |
| Standout feature | Speed + AI search on your docs | AI agent flags stale docs automatically |
| Scope | Docs-only | Docs + cross-tool search |
| Best fit | Engineering teams, startups wanting control | Teams migrating off a wiki that's gone stale |
Verdict
Pick Outline if you want a fast editor, care about owning your data, or want the option to self-host without per-seat costs creeping up as the team grows.
Pick Slite if your actual problem is docs going stale because nobody remembers to update them after a Jira ticket closes or a Slack thread resolves — that's the specific pain Slite is built to catch, and it's worth the per-user cost if it's a real problem for your team.
Both are real, maintained products actively competing for the same "wiki that doesn't rot" use case — the honest answer is that the choice comes down to whether self-hosting matters to you more than automatic drift detection.