Self-Hosting with Docmost: Teams, Spaces & Permissions (2026)

Deploying Docmost on your VPS is just the beginning. The real value comes from how you structure your team’s knowledge base. This guide covers the practical side of running Docmost for a team: organizing spaces, setting permissions, understanding use cases, and getting the most out of self-hosting.

Why Teams Choose Docmost

Docmost was built to replace the friction of Confluence and the vendor lock-in of Notion. For self-hosters, it solves a real problem: enterprise teams need collaborative docs with access control, and the open-source market lacked a polished option until Docmost arrived.

Core reasons teams pick Docmost:

• No per-seat pricing — your cost is just the VPS (~$5–6/mo)
• Data sovereignty — all docs stay on your server
• Real-time collaboration — live cursors, no save conflicts
• Hierarchical structure — nested pages work like Notion
• Granular permissions — control who can view, comment, or edit at every level

Recommended VPS for Team Use

For a team of up to 20 users, we recommend:

Understanding Docmost’s Structure

Docmost organizes content in three levels:

Workspace
  └── Space (e.g., "Engineering", "Product", "HR")
        └── Page (e.g., "API Reference")
              └── Sub-page (e.g., "Authentication")

Workspace: The top-level container for your entire organization. All users within a workspace can see each other.

Spaces: Think of these as departments or projects. Each space has its own members and permissions. A user can be a member of some spaces but not others.

Pages: The actual documents. Pages support nested sub-pages for deep documentation hierarchies.

Setting Up Spaces for Your Team

A good space structure separates concerns and limits noise. Example setups:

For a software company:

Engineering/
  Architecture Decisions
  API Reference
  Runbooks
Product/
  Roadmap
  Feature Specs
  User Research
HR/
  Onboarding
  Policies

For an agency:

Internal/
  Processes
  Templates
Client-ProjectName/
  Briefs
  Deliverables
  Meeting Notes

To create a space in Docmost:

1. Click “New Space” in the sidebar
2. Name the space and optionally set an icon
3. Set the space visibility (public to workspace or private)
4. Add members and assign roles

Permissions Model

Docmost uses role-based access control at two levels:

Workspace Roles

• Owner: Full admin — manages billing, members, and all settings
• Admin: Can manage members and spaces
• Member: Standard user with access to permitted spaces

Space Roles

• Admin: Can manage space settings, members, and all pages
• Editor: Can create and edit pages
• Viewer: Read-only access

Set a space to private and add only relevant members. This is ideal for sensitive spaces like HR or Finance.

Real-Time Collaboration in Practice

Docmost uses operational transformation (OT) to handle concurrent edits. In practice:

• Multiple users see each other’s cursors while editing
• Changes sync immediately without manual saves
• Page history lets you revert to any previous version

For this to work well, your VPS needs a stable connection and proper WebSocket support in your Nginx config (see the Upgrade and Connection headers in our installation guide).

Integrations and Extensions

Docmost supports several integrations out of the box:

• SMTP email: For invitations and notifications — configure in Settings > Mail
• OIDC/SSO: Connect to Keycloak, Authentik, or any OIDC provider for centralized auth
• Custom domain: Serve Docmost on your own subdomain via Nginx
• Webhooks: Trigger external actions when pages are created or updated (check current release for availability)

Use Cases

Engineering Team Wiki

Store architecture decisions (ADRs), deployment runbooks, incident post-mortems, and API documentation. Docmost’s code blocks and nested pages make technical docs readable.

Internal Knowledge Base

HR policies, onboarding checklists, company handbook — all in one place, with read-only access for employees and edit access for HR.

Project Documentation

Use one space per client or project. Share read-only links with external stakeholders or restrict to internal teams only.

Personal Knowledge Management

A single Docmost instance can also serve one person who wants a self-hosted Notion — cheaper and more private than any SaaS alternative.

Maintenance Tips

• Backups: Schedule daily pg_dump backups and store them off-server (S3, Backblaze B2, etc.)
• Updates: Run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d regularly to get security patches
• Monitoring: Use Uptime Kuma (also self-hosted) to alert you if Docmost goes down
• Resource check: Run docker stats periodically to watch RAM usage as your team grows

Scaling Beyond One VPS

If your team grows significantly, Docmost can scale horizontally — but for most teams under 100 users, a single Hetzner or Contabo VPS will handle the load comfortably. PostgreSQL is the bottleneck; upgrading to a server with more RAM and NVMe storage solves most performance issues.

For more self-hosting guides, visit selfhostvps.com/en/best/.