📚 Docwell
A complete self-hosted help center — markdown in, branded SEO-ready docs out.
Docwell at a glance
| Price | $79, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | GitBook at $79/mo (Premium) — roughly $948 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Business Operations |
Docwell features
🎨 Branded public help center
Your logo, brand color and hero search box — no "Powered by" badge to pay to remove.
⚡ Instant FTS5 search
Search-as-you-type with highlighted snippets, powered by SQLite FTS5.
✍️ Markdown editor with live preview
Split-pane editing rendered by the exact same pipeline as the public site — plus paste-to-upload images.
🗂️ Collections → categories → articles
Reordering, slug control, and a draft / published workflow — drafts are invisible and excluded from search.
🔗 Internal links done right
[[article-slug]] wikilinks plus hand-picked related articles, auto table of contents, prev/next navigation.
👍 Helpful votes + feedback report
One vote per visitor, optional comment on a downvote, and a report showing your worst-scoring articles first — so you know exactly what to fix.
🔍 SEO done right
Meta descriptions, OG tags, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, canonical URLs, clean URLs, smart 404s that suggest close articles.
🗄️ One SQLite file
Server-rendered public pages (zero JS framework), Docker included, desktop mode for offline writing, zero telemetry.
$79 once — that's the whole pricing page
GitBook charges $79/mo (Premium) — roughly $948 a year, every year. Docwell is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Docwell inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Docwell guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/knowledge-base-mvp. $79 buys the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates.
Is the public site fast?
Yes — it's server-rendered plain HTML with no JS framework, which is also why the SEO story is so clean. Search is the only scripted part, and it's instant vanilla JS over FTS5.
What doesn't it do vs GitBook?
Honestly: no git-repo sync, no AI answers, no multi-language localization, no multi-author roles — the admin is single-password. GitBook is genuinely better for open-source API docs maintained from a repo by a team. Docwell is better for the product help center you write and own.