Fabric vs Slab

Last updated May 2026

Slab is what Confluence should have looked like if it were designed today. Clean interface. Good search. Beautiful editor. Simple structure. It solved the design problem. It didn't solve the maintenance problem.

Someone still has to write the pages. Someone still has to keep them current. Someone still has to decide the structure, prune stale content, and make sure the wiki reflects reality. For small, disciplined teams, Slab makes that work more pleasant. For teams that create knowledge in messy, fragmented ways, notes, PDFs, meeting recordings, saved articles, voice memos, screenshots, a wiki isn't the answer regardless of how good it looks.

Fabric takes a different approach. You save things. The AI organises and connects them automatically. Semantic search finds anything by meaning. No pages to write. No structure to maintain. No wiki to tend.

Comparison table

What is Slab?

Slab is a modern internal wiki for startups and growing teams. The editor is clean and fast. Topics provide hierarchical structure without the complexity of Confluence's space-and-page-tree model. A single post can belong to multiple topics. Real-time collaboration lets teams write together. Unified search works across Slab and integrated apps like Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub, which is a genuine strength. Users consistently praise the search and the ease of use.

Free for up to 10 users with unlimited posts. Startup at $6.67/user/month. Business at $12.50/user/month. Enterprise custom. Slab has no AI features as of 2026, which is a striking omission. No API access on lower tiers. No SOC 2 compliance. No native mobile apps. It's deliberately simple. For teams that want a wiki without the overhead of Confluence, Slab is the cleanest option available.

What is Fabric?

Fabric is an AI workspace that combines file storage, note-taking, search, tasks, collaboration, and publishing. The Fabric Memory Engine automatically extracts, enriches, and maps relationships between everything you save. Where Slab is a wiki you write and maintain, Fabric is a library that understands your content without you building the structure. See also how Fabric compares to Confluence, the enterprise wiki Slab was built to replace.

Key differences

The maintenance question

Slab is a better-maintained wiki than Confluence. The clean interface makes writing pleasant. The simple topic structure is easier to navigate. But it's still a wiki. Pages exist because someone wrote them. Pages stay current because someone updates them. Structure reflects reality because someone maintains it.

The question is whether your team will actually do that. Most don't. Even with a beautiful editor, wikis decay. The onboarding guide gets written and never updated after the process changes. The product FAQ reflects last quarter's features. The engineering runbook is three versions behind. Slab makes the maintenance more pleasant. It doesn't eliminate it.

Fabric doesn't have this problem because it doesn't depend on anyone writing or maintaining pages. You save content. The Memory Engine extracts, enriches, and indexes it. The AI maps relationships automatically. Semantic search finds things by meaning, not by topic hierarchy. The knowledge stays useful without a librarian.

AI

Slab has no AI. In 2026, this is a significant gap. No AI assistant. No AI-powered search. No content summarisation. No auto-organisation. No question-answering across your knowledge base. You search by keyword. You browse by topic. You find things the way you found things in 2015.

Fabric's AI assistant is foundational. It understands your entire library, answers questions across all your content, summarises documents, transcribes audio and video, maps relationships, and takes actions. Multiple models. No credit limits. The AI isn't a feature. It's the architecture.

Search

Slab's search is genuinely good for a wiki. Fast full-text search across posts and integrated apps. Users praise it consistently. For finding a specific wiki page, it works.

Fabric's search operates at a different level. Semantic search finds content by meaning. In-document search goes to the page in a PDF or the timestamp in a video. Visual search finds similar images. Colour search finds assets by palette. Cross-platform search pulls from Google Drive, Notion, and Dropbox alongside your Fabric library. Slab's search is good for text. Fabric's search is good for everything.

Content types

Slab handles wiki pages with embedded images and files. The content model is text you write. If your team's knowledge lives in wiki pages, that's fine.

Fabric handles everything: PDFs, images, video, audio, documents, slides, spreadsheets, ePubs, links, emails. All extracted, enriched, and searchable. If your team's knowledge lives in meeting recordings, saved articles, design files, PDFs, and screenshots alongside written documentation, Slab covers the documentation. Fabric covers all of it.

The editor

Credit where it's due. Slab's editor is beautiful. Clean, fast, with just enough formatting options. Real-time co-editing. Multiple topics per post. It's the best wiki editor in its class and better than what Confluence offers. If writing wiki pages is your team's core workflow, Slab's editor is a genuine pleasure.

Fabric's markdown editor is full-featured with real-time co-editing and version history. It's a good editor. Slab's is more polished for the specific task of writing wiki documentation. Fabric's strength is that the editor sits inside a broader workspace where notes connect to files, AI, search, tasks, and publishing.

Beyond the wiki

Slab is a wiki. It doesn't have a spatial canvas, meeting transcription, task management, publishing with analytics, annotations on media, or an AI assistant. It writes and organises wiki pages. That's the scope.

Fabric is a workspace. Notes, files, canvas with live embeds, meeting transcription, tasks with due dates and reminders, annotations on any content type, publishing with analytics. If your team's knowledge work extends beyond documentation, Fabric covers the rest.

Pricing

Slab is well-priced for a wiki. Free for 10 users. Startup at $6.67/user/month. These are reasonable numbers. Per-user pricing still scales linearly with headcount, and Business at $12.50/user adds up for larger teams.

Fabric: generous free plan. $5/month Plus tier. No per-user pricing. A 20-person team on Slab Startup pays $133/month. The same team on Fabric pays $5/month.

When to use each

Use Fabric if your team's knowledge lives in more than wiki pages. You want AI that understands all your content. You want search by meaning across every file type. You want meeting transcription, a spatial canvas, publishing with analytics, and tasks. You don't want to maintain a wiki structure. You want the knowledge system to work without a librarian. See also: Fabric as a team wiki.

Use Slab if your team is small, disciplined, and committed to maintaining written documentation. You want the cleanest wiki editor available. You want unified search across Slab and your integrated apps. You don't need AI, semantic search, or diverse content type support. You want the Confluence experience redesigned for 2024, at a fair price. Slab is genuinely good at what it does.

Why people move from Slab to Fabric

The wiki decayed. Even with a beautiful editor. Pages went stale. Structure drifted. Nobody maintained it. Fabric's automatic organisation doesn't depend on discipline.

They had more than wiki pages. Meeting recordings, PDFs, design files, saved research, screenshots, voice memos. Slab handles text. Fabric handles everything.

They wanted AI. No AI in a knowledge tool in 2026 is a hard gap. Summarisation, question-answering, relationship mapping, transcription. Fabric has it. Slab doesn't.

They wanted semantic search. Finding knowledge by meaning, not by remembering which topic it was filed under. Fabric's search finds things Slab's full-text search can't.

Per-user pricing scaled poorly. A growing team meant a growing Slab bill. Fabric's flat pricing doesn't scale with headcount.

FAQs

Is Slab better than Confluence?

For most teams, yes. Cleaner interface, simpler structure, better search, easier to adopt. It's what Confluence should have been. But it's still a wiki with the same fundamental maintenance requirement.

Does Slab have AI?

No. As of 2026, Slab has no AI features. No AI search, no AI assistant, no content summarisation, no auto-organisation. This is a significant gap compared to every other knowledge tool in its category.

Is Fabric free?

Generous free plan. $5/month Plus tier. No per-user pricing. Slab is free for 10 users, then $6.67-12.50/user/month.

Can Slab handle PDFs and video?

Files can be attached to Slab posts, but they're not indexed, searchable, or AI-queryable. Fabric extracts, enriches, and makes every file type searchable, including inside PDFs and inside video transcripts.

Which has better search?

Slab's search is good for a wiki: fast full-text across posts and integrated apps. Fabric's search is a different category: semantic search by meaning, inside documents, inside recordings, by visual similarity, by colour, across connected platforms.

Will my team actually maintain a wiki?

Be honest with yourself about this one. If your team reliably writes, updates, and structures documentation, Slab is a great home for it. If your team creates knowledge in fragments, scattered across tools, and nobody maintains the structure, Fabric captures it all without requiring the discipline a wiki demands.