The Story of Yuque: From Alibaba’s Internal Knowledge Base to an External Product

Yuque is a cloud‑based knowledge‑base originally incubated by Alibaba’s technical team, enabling online creation and collaboration of notes, documents, and weekly reports.

Founder Wang Baoping (nickname “Yu Bo”) and the early adopters were Alibaba’s front‑end and product‑design teams, and despite early resistance from engineers, the product persisted with a vision of becoming a “new generation Office”.

Unlike other enterprise knowledge tools such as Confluence and Wiki, Yuque was built to fit Alibaba’s fast‑changing organizational structure, avoiding the knowledge silos and rigidity of those platforms.

In 2016, the team introduced a “策马扬鞭” innovation mechanism, which helped Yuque gain official status and focus on its future development.

Engineers demanded the return of Markdown support, leading the team to create a special Markdown channel for engineers while also adding a rich‑text editor for non‑technical users.

After internal success—reaching over 90% usage within Alibaba—the product was opened to external customers in April 2019, quickly attracting thousands of enterprises, startups, schools, museums, and non‑profits.

Security became a core selling point: Yuque leverages Alibaba’s ISO certifications, Level‑3 protection from the Ministry of Public Security, and dual data encryption, assuring customers that their documents are as safe as financial data in Alipay.

The product team continuously gathers feedback, implements features such as PPT/Word/Sketch preview, and supports educational institutions with free usage, demonstrating a strong user‑centric development approach.

Yuque’s journey illustrates the challenges of scaling an internal tool to a market‑ready product, balancing engineer preferences with broader user needs, and maintaining rigorous security while expanding its ecosystem.