Show HN: BookStack – An open source wiki platform and alternative to Confluence

Great comment and very interesting to read your perspective on it.

Really if we’re honest, any company using Bookstack should be able to afford to chuck you $20/month or something (barring perhaps one-person bootstrapped startups). It’s likely red tape, bureaucracy and the internal culture that prevents this more than financial means.

And especially so if support demands are being made of you!

Future XWiki employee (should start in March!). Feel free to reach out to XWiki [1] [2], they'll be happy to answer your question and address your specific needs. They are nice. Feel free to contact me if you'd prefer but I'll be less competent than them for obvious reasons.

I don't know many things about XWiki yet, but the main difference between MediaWiki and XWiki is probably the X in XWiki (eXtensible). XWiki is more like a development platform to build a website, a blog, or a collaborative platform (internal or public) that you can tailor to your needs. What you put as contents is highly customizable / scriptable and several Wiki syntaxes are supported. The XWiki syntax can be extended to support your custom features if needed. There are a lot of apps [3] to extend XWiki (some are paid, but open source anyway so you can compile them yourself). LDAP is supported. XWiki will also provide support or specific developments if needed.

MediaWiki is developed for Wikipedia first. That's what you can read on XWiki's website anyway. But if you don't need anything that MediaWiki doesn't already provide and like its UX, it can't be a wrong decision to go for it. Many people outside Wikimedia use it and the UX is familiar to everybody, and that's huge. Both tools can be self hosted (and MediaWiki is quite easy to install), MediaWiki is mostly in PHP, XWiki is in Java. XWiki can be hosted for you by XWiki SAS. They'll also help handle migrations from Confluence and are currently handling a lot of them, and I'm sure they will be interested by hearing about migrations from other tools too.

I guess WikiMatrix would be a good starting point [4]. XWiki also have comparisons to common collaborative platforms on their websites including MediaWiki. They are obviously biased, but don't lie neither. You might want to check them out.

I hadn't encountered Bookstack, before. The UI seems quite clean. I hope we'll have the pleasure to meet and discuss at some point! The UK is not far, we are neighbors. Hmm, neighbours!

edit: by the way, you might be interested by XWiki's online presentation at FOSDEM on the 5th of February [5], as well as any other presentation in the collaboration and content management devroom, because not everything collaboration is a wiki :-) [6]

[1] https://www.xwiki.org/

[2] https://www.xwiki.com/

[3] https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps

[4] https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+...

[5] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/

[6] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_con...

Yeah. The reason we’re running a lot of our own open source stacks is that getting anything officially approved has to go through multiple layers of bureaucracy and approvals.

Getting approval to throw an open source project some money is likely to be even crazier (probably not a concept they ever imagined).

Yeah, Tables are a challenge in general. The trouble with them from an editor perspective is the range of desired options and control (Many each at table, row, cell level) is fairly vast.

I'm currently in the process of building a new content editor which I'm hoping would provide better opportunities to make such controls more intuitive.