Share Internal Docs Without Confluence

The Confluence problem

Confluence is documentation software for teams that want to write documentation in Confluence. If your team already lives in Confluence, maintains a page tree there, and uses Confluence's editor as the authoring workflow — this post isn't for you.

But many engineering teams use git as their knowledge base. READMEs, ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), runbooks, API contracts, onboarding guides — all in Markdown, versioned in the repository, reviewed via pull requests.

The audience for this documentation often extends beyond engineering: PMs read the ADRs, DevOps reads the runbooks, new employees follow the onboarding guides. These readers don't have GitHub access. Even with GitHub access, reading raw Markdown in a browser is a poor experience.

Confluence is the traditional answer. But Confluence requires:

• Manually copying or syncing content from git to Confluence
• Maintaining two sources of truth (the Markdown in git, the page in Confluence)
• Per-seat licensing ($5–6/user/month at the Standard tier)
• An editor that strips code formatting and breaks technical content

A simpler path

If you have a documentation directory in your repository:

docs/
├── architecture/
│   ├── overview.md
│   └── decisions/
│       ├── adr-001-database.md
│       └── adr-002-api-design.md
├── runbooks/
│   ├── deployment.md
│   └── incident-response.md
└── onboarding/
    └── new-engineer.md

dsp publish ./docs/ --name "engineering-docs"

Display renders the Markdown to HTML, creates navigation, and serves it at a company-authenticated URL. Non-engineers click the link, authenticate with their company email, and read rendered documentation — syntax-highlighted code blocks, formatted tables, working internal links.

Auto-publish when docs change

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
    paths: ['docs/**']
 
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Publish docs
        run: |
          npm install -g @display-dev/cli
          dsp publish ./docs/ --name "engineering-docs"
        env:
          DISPLAYDEV_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.DISPLAYDEV_API_KEY }}

Docs update whenever the Markdown changes on main. Git is the source of truth. The Confluence page tree stays empty.

What this doesn't give you

Display is a publishing layer, not a documentation platform. There's no editor, no collaborative authoring, no Confluence-style page tree with drag-and-drop organization, no inline comments on documentation pages.

For teams that need those features — editorial workflows, non-git authoring, content management for non-technical writers — Confluence or Notion is appropriate.

For teams that author in git and need a non-engineer-readable URL for the output, Display is a lighter and cheaper path.

Pricing comparison