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

bookstackapp.com

71–80 of 203 posts

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

#71
post #69

How does this compare to wikijs? This looks very good, but I'm already very happy with wikijs.

If you're happy with wikijs I'd advise that you probably stay on it to be honest. WikiJS is a great project. They two differ quite a bit in design and structure, if wikijs's structure works well for you already you may find yourself fighting against the BookStack structure/layout. Can always give the demo [1] a go to get an idea.

[1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/

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

#72
This looks like a great piece of software. I was never a fan of Confluence, but that is more that Confluence, I feel is backwards. Since confluence, the few opinions is has, is reverse. You typically get some kind of set up like Confluence Space is owned by a person, who then adds approved editors. The default should be open editing, then locking down to specific people. What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that information ends up being organized by TEAMS not by topic. Which is a terrible way to document. This idea of Books -> Pages seems to be more opinionated that would hopefully get people to not make this mistake.

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

#73
post #45

The only issue I have with many Confluence alternatives is that they don't support multiple people editing the same document, at the same time, à la google docs. Does this? I can't tell from the landing page.

All real Confluence alternative (Confluence is a b2b software not a wiki tool) Notion, Guru, Slab, Slite ... are supporting that since their creation.

As someone else pointed out, creating a good real time editing experience is tricky, especially if the editor is block based.

I would add Saga (https://saga.so) to the list of alternatives.

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

#74
post #54

I can't say I would use BookStack. The demo doesn't show the same sort of ease of use that Confluence has, nor the features. I really like Outline https://www.getoutline.com/ as it is open source, self hosted and free if you don't use the Enterprise features. It really does seem to be a Confluence replacement. https://www.getoutline.com/compare/confluence-alternative

You need to use slack or google for the selfhost setup. Which is non starter for many people.

Yeah. I come across this once in a while, go yay, find out about the auth requirements, and do a complete 180.

I know I can’t tell them how to build their product, but really?

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

#75

I can't say I would use BookStack. The demo doesn't show the same sort of ease of use that Confluence has, nor the features. I really like Outline https://www.getoutline.com/ as it is open source, self hosted and free if you don't use the Enterprise features. It really does seem to be a Confluence replacement. https://www.getoutline.com/compare/confluence-alternative

Their price ranges left me scratching my head.

1-10 people: 10 USD/month

11-100 people: 79 USD/month

101-250 people: 249 USD/month

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

#76
This looks PERFECT.

I'll trial it out tomorrow. I can see on individual pages (books?) you're tracking changes, e.g. created and last edited. Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP?

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

#77
post #13

I've been looking for something just like this. Does it support migration from Confluence? I glanced over the features section and didn't see mention of that, but perhaps I missed it?

Unfortunately no readily available migration path from Confluence. I'm not familiar enough with Confluence myself to understand the formats and options that we'd need to carry across & support. Our API [1] has recently matured to now support the different content types so that could be utilised for such a migration job although the API is still growing to cover more actions/models. Have recently been thinking about p…

Oh, prepare for some fun with ADF (atlassian document format) if you ever do try to build migration from confluence. On the positive side you’ll have to deal with only one flavor, but I swear they have like 10 different ways to present/format their documents across all their products.

Fortunately, a lot of the handling is open sourced in atlaskit.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently come across a similar question on Reddit. While I can't offer the company perspective I can offer a maintainer perspective: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rwmiwn/recommen... ?

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!

It's easier if you create some value added service like "premium support" or an Active Directory integration plugin then charge for that.

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

#79
post #64

Can anyone with experience with multiple wiki platforms compare this with XWiki and/or MediaWiki. I may be asked to update $WORK's wiki, which is currently MoinMoin (IIRC), and am looking for anyone with more experience so I don't have to start testing from scratch. I've run MediaWiki before, but am not beholden to using it just because of past/current familiarity. Importing from MoinMoin would be nice, but not absol…

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…

There is a "semantic" extension to MediaWiki that makes it easier to support many enterprise use cases with data visualizations, custom queries (potentially referencing information from multiple wiki pages) and the like. It is somewhat widely used for wikis other than Wikipedia, that can simply defer to the Wikidata project for those needs.

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

#80

Would be nice if they can offer a managed version in the near future

I think this isn't a good strategy for the project, at a commercial level. They currently have a well define niche. Competing in a much larger market without a clear competitive advantage won't work.
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