Outline is a team knowledge base and wiki for writing, organising and searching documents, with real-time collaboration and question answering over a team's own documents. It is offered as a cloud service and as software that organisations can self-host. The product is developed by General Outline, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a New York address. Outline is an alternative to proprietary team wiki and documentation tools such as Confluence or Notion.
The licence matters most for a European organisation. Outline is published under the Business Source License 1.1. Its source code is visible, but this licence is not an open-source licence in the sense of the OSI. It converts to Apache 2.0 on 12 October 2030 and prohibits offering the software to third parties as a document service. The vendor's data processing agreement places processing primarily in the United States, with most sub-processors there and one in Canada. It refers to the GDPR and EU Standard Contractual Clauses but names no EU data-storage option. Self-hosting keeps content on the organisation's own infrastructure.