BookStack vs Confluence
BookStack and Confluence are both wiki and knowledge base software. BookStack is open source under MIT, with 19k GitHub stars. Confluence is a commercial product from Atlassian.
Which to pick
- Pick BookStack when
- You want a simple, stable self-hosted documentation wiki that non-technical staff can use.
- Pick Confluence when
- Your teams already use Jira and need a shared documentation space that links to tickets.
Side by side
A wiki that organises documentation into shelves, books, chapters and pages, with a WYSIWYG editor, permissions and search.
A team wiki with pages, spaces, templates and comments, tightly linked to Jira.
Mainly one maintainer, and development has moved to Codeberg.
Content sprawls and search is weak without curation, and Atlassian has ended server licences, pushing you to cloud or costly Data Center.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and self-hosted server
PHP, Laravel and MySQL
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Atlassian
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
19k GitHub stars
919 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v26.09.2.
Not known
Other comparisons
More wiki and knowledge base software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.