BookStack vs Notion
BookStack and Notion are both wiki and knowledge base software. BookStack is open source under MIT, with 19k GitHub stars. Notion is a commercial product from Notion Labs.
Which to pick
- Pick BookStack when
- You want a simple, stable self-hosted documentation wiki that non-technical staff can use.
- Pick Notion when
- A small or mid-size team wants one flexible tool for docs, wiki and light project tracking.
Side by side
A wiki that organises documentation into shelves, books, chapters and pages, with a WYSIWYG editor, permissions and search.
A workspace of pages and databases for notes, wikis, project tracking and docs, with AI search and agents built in.
Mainly one maintainer, and development has moved to Codeberg.
Cloud only, slow on large workspaces, offline support is limited, and its flexibility leads to messy structures.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
PHP, Laravel and MySQL
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Notion Labs
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
4.1k 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.