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Introduction

CompassDocs is a modern documentation and knowledge platform for teams. Create, organize, and search SOPs, technical documentation, policies, and internal knowledge with a clean interface, AI-powered search, and version history.

The whole site is private — every visitor signs in — and what they can do is governed by their role.

Core concepts

Section titled “Core concepts”
  • Spaces group knowledge by team or domain (Engineering, People Ops, Security, and so on). A space is internal (everyone signed in), private (granted groups only), or public — served read-only to the internet via the public site.
  • Documents come in four color-coded types — SOPs, Technical docs, Policies, and Knowledge/how-tos — authored in Markdown with a live preview.
  • Roles — Viewer, Editor, Approver, and Admin — decide who can read, write, publish, and administer. See Users & roles.
  • Approval workflow — in strict mode, an Editor’s changes to a published doc go to a review queue for an Approver; in open mode they publish directly. See Approval workflow.
  • Suggestions let any signed-in user propose an edit without changing the doc directly.
  • Version history snapshots every content change so you can browse and compare past revisions.

How search works

Section titled “How search works”

Search is powered by PostgreSQL full-text search (a generated, field-weighted tsvector column with a GIN index). Title matches outrank body text, exact title hits get a boost, and fresher documents win ties — so the most relevant result comes first. Results are instant, keyword-highlighted, and available everywhere via the command palette — ⌘K, or Ctrl K on Windows and Linux — which searches people, spaces, settings, and actions in the same box. You can narrow with operators like type:, tag:, space:, and author:, and drafts stay hidden from Viewers in search, lists, and AI answers.

Turn on semantic search and results also match by meaning, blended with keyword hits. The Ask CompassDocs page answers plain-English questions: with an AI provider configured it synthesizes cited answers via a lightweight RAG pipeline; without one it falls back to the best-matching snippets. See Searching & finding documents and AI-powered search.

Editions & license

Section titled “Editions & license”

CompassDocs follows an open-core model. The Community edition is free and open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license — self-host it for free, including inside a company, with unlimited users. A self-hosted Enterprise license adds single sign-on (OIDC and SAML), SCIM provisioning, Microsoft 365 directory & group sync, policy acknowledgements, training & onboarding, and audit export, and a managed CompassDocs Cloud tier is offered separately. See License & editions and pricing for the details.

Where to next

Section titled “Where to next”
CompassDocs service status