BookStack: Simple and Free Wiki Software

Thanks for sharing my project! I started building BookStack just over 9 years ago to suit a need at work, and have been improving & maintaining it since. I left full time employment three years ago and have been focusing on BookStack since, with my living costs now covered via project donations, sponsorships & support services, and the growth of these continue as shown in my blogpost here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/blog/9-years-of-bookstack/#fina....

The platform has been designed for ease-of-use, with mixed-technical-skill workplace use in mind. The design and content structure is (purposefully) quite opinionated though so does not suit all use-cases, but for many it works quite well.

Technically it's built as quite a technically simple PHP/Laravel/MySQL stack with custom JavaScript sprinkled in where needed. The default WYSIWYG editor is TinyMCE based, although due to TinyMCE license changes I'm currently building a lexical-fork-based new editor.

If you'd like to understand the project more, a project FAQ can be found on our site here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/about/project-faq/

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BookStack is great if you're small. There's no file locking/conduct management when two people are editing the same page and there's no co-authoring. I used it for docs at a startup I was in around 2018 and this lack of feature really got in our way once we grew to more than 10 people.

The feature is still missing today, I get email updates from the same ancient GitHub issue often of people asking for it and the dev responding that they don't like the idea of systematically preventing conflicts. Which is fair, if I had the skill and inclination I would have forked the project and just done it myself. But I'm not a software engineer, so I had no choice but to use different software that fit my needs.

If you're a really small shop BookStack has a very nice and clean UI and is a great wiki-type offering. At any kind of scale the cracks start to show, though.

We use it at work and its ok. Missing permalinks and the permission concept does not fit our usecase.

Bookstack has been awesome for helping me build out my tabletop roleplay campaigns with friends and for storing recipes. Funnily enough, these are things where a “book” metaphor really makes sense! My spouse uses it has a general knowledge base for their projects and all sorts of topics.

Are there more featureful and flexible wiki softwares out there? Sure. But Bookstack is my favorite by far because 1) I never feel lost and overwhelmed by the amorphous structure and dizzying array of features I don’t need and 2) it is the easiest to self-host and maintain of the many self-hosted wikis I trialed in my homelab ~5 years ago.

Outline is another great wiki that I have been self-hosting for a couple years now: https://github.com/outline/outline

Would be great if we could actually export a book as pdf or in a format that could be printed or worked on in book publishing software. I could not find that option, is it available?

Having tried this (when searching for a self-hosted documentation system), I abandoned it due to the inability to change the reference to the book-specific-nomenclature. Still, a nice project in all other regards. (I ended up using Notion due to its flexibility, but still hope for a self-hosted notion clone).

It’s look gorgeous, it feels gorgeous, but I’m sadly stuck in my organization because the OAuth support doesn’t expose enough knobs. (I.e. what if it isn’t OIDC? What if it requires one non-standard scope and nothing else? What if there’s no encryption key seemingly to be found? Etc.)

It's a very nice project, I hope a day they choose to support PostgreSQL and SQLite though, they are much more popular these days and chances you already use both, just need to add a DB are high.

We use this at my company and I'm a fan!

In a nutshell, how is this different from MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia?

I love free book browsing and hosting. This looks like a good project.

Good to see simple wiki / confluence alternatives. But confluence is here to stay, with all it's rich features.

I switched jobs and thus move away from confluence to ADO wiki and life is never endingly painful for internal knowledge management!

Either there are 100s of word docx or there's confluence that can be easily queried, with various other capabilities using it's plugins for draw.io and mermaid.js.

Markdown for large tables is just silly and hard to maintain. AsciiDoc is great, but a bit too much for docs that are shared with product teams.