23 ms·

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

562 points by ssddanbrown 5y ago

punnerud 5y ago
Should also check out MediaWiki. The last year the visual editor is finally included with PHP, making the installation simple: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  A visual editor does not solve mediawiki's bloat which is useless for 99% of anyone who isn't Wikipedia or another large organization, nor MediaWiki being entirely organized around pages. Nor does it solve Mediawiki's ugly, Web 1.0 design. In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file variables. Adding any of a slew of auth methods is trivial in Bookstack. In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date. Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections - not "pages." It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    > It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot. Thank you so much! > In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date. I've always attempted to be "batteries included" with BookStack due to this frustration. Means we have to be more limited in abilities but hopefully provide a better experience for what we do allow.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    > In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file variables. This isn't really true. During install process you are asked which you want. If you press the private button when prompted you get a private wiki. If you press public you get public. If you want to change after you installed, you do have to edit a text based config file. You only have to edit two lines, but i appreciate that text based config file is a turn off for some people. > Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections - not "pages." I agree that this is a significant difference from mediawiki. You can do that sort of thing in MediaWiki, but you'll be swimming upstream. [Dislaimer: im a mediawiki developer]
- unixhero 5y ago
  No not really any point in also checking out MediaWiki. Bookstack has surpassed MediaWiki in usability by leaps and bounds. They are not even comparable any more, aside from being able to do wiki edits they are separate use cases by now.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
This looks great! One thing which would be useful would be an approver role or step for document creation and updating. In a lot of orgs it's necessary to have someone sign off on changes to sop's
ssddanbrown 5y ago
I've been working on BookStack for over 6 years now, learning a lot about open source project maintainership during that time. Originally developed it while looking for a documentation system for my mixed-technical-skill workplace. Wanted something easy to use without having to get finance involved when increasing our user count. With Confluence backing away from their self-hosted offerings, hopefully many will find BookStack useful. It's not supposed to be a direct replacement, and the design & content structure is quite opinionated, but it can serve many of the same use-cases as Confluence had served.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to your project. Good luck with it.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    That's cool. I recently built MFA into the access flow, with a sight to extend methods where needed, although any instance using the SAML/LDAP/OIDC auth options could enforce MFA on the identity provider side.
  - philonoist 5y ago
    I apologize but may I know what you mean by "saas pass"?
    - yebyen 5y ago
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Bookstack looks like an amazing feat of engineering — it’s overwhelmingly the wiki I want to deploy given other F/OSS options. just today I was showing it to a friend and it is impressive how clean and considered it is. Thanks for maintaining and improving this project
  - 5y ago
tommica 5y ago
Such a nice tool - we use it at work, and the people managing like how simple it us to use!
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  That's great to hear, usability has been at the forefront of it's design and development.
- npsomaratna 5y ago
  Same here. Simple, focused, and easily usable by non-tech people. We adopted Bookstack several years ago, and we've never looked back.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    Great to hear it's been used to some longer term success!
tgv 5y ago
Impressive. I'm definitely going to give this a look. Right now, we've got our technical docs in Sharepoint (yeah, that Sharepoint), mixing its built-in docs and Word docs, and I'd really like to get rid of that.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Thanks! My original scenario was a mix of gist code snippets and word docs. The horror is when those word docs are version by file name (server_docs_final-v2.docx). It definitely helps to get things aligned into a platform that people understand how to use.
ukasiu 5y ago
Even simpler Markdown-based: https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  I'd say that simplicity can very much depend on audience, use-case and opinion. The design and content structure between platforms appears quite different. BookStack does support Markdown content editing although it is WYSIWYG or Markdown, jumping between the two isn't really supported (Yet, Hoping to achieve this later this year).
- pkz 5y ago
  One of the benefits of Counfluence is that it is one of the only Wikis where I've seen non-technical people being able to create content on a daily basis. Linking pages, inserting graphs and images just works. I have yet to see that in anything based on markdown.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    Yeah, non-technical folk were one of my key audiences for BookStack which most other popular open-source offerings, at the time, seemed to lack focus for. People do love their markdown input though. I'm currently rebuilding the editor; My goal is it have an easy WYSIWYG editor that allows instance back-and-forth switching to Markdown. One of the tricker parts is avoiding obscure/custom markdown syntax for non-common/custom content blocks, as one of my main principals is to ensure user content is portable/non-proprietary.
  - tommoor 5y ago
    Outline's editor is similar to Dropbox Paper, Markdown shortcuts work but knowing Markdown isn't a requirement to use it
CPLX 5y ago
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?
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  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 possibly offering some form of paid service support service to help the process and help fund the project. [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    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.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Confluence import could be a premium feature you could offer.
jethro_tell 5y ago
This looks really good. I've been looking for a good wiki solution. Gonna give this a try in the next few weeks.
drcursor 5y ago
A killer feature would be confluence import. How do the permissions work ? Same way as confluence (inherited) ?
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Sure, See my other comment here in regards to import/migration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852265 I'm not sure how Confluence permissions work. Within BookStack pages (Main content) is generally within a hierarchy of Shelves > Books > Chapters > Pages. Both shelves and chapters are optional parts of the hierarchy,and Books can be members of multiple shelves. General permissions (Edit/Create/Delete) can be controlled per-role, and multiple roles can be assigned to a user. Permissions can then be overridden per hierarchy item. Permissions for Books and Chapters will cascade to child items unless they're overridden.
bloggie 5y ago
I came across your software a few weeks ago when I was looking for some kind of locally hosted collaborative documentation suite for internal use, basically, a wiki that can be used by people who aren’t programmers. I was a bit incredulous when I found that it is basically expected to use markdown if you want to have a wiki. This really raises the barrier to entry and restricts users to ones that are technically proficient and have the time to learn and deal with markdown. Wysiwyg is a necessity. Easy content insertion is also necessary. We haven’t yet integrated bookstack, but I don’t see any alternatives (sticking with the locally hosted requirement)
- wwarek 5y ago
  Not sure if this fully fits your needs but you might want to look at Wiki.js. You can self host it, has WYSIWYG editor available (as well as HTML and markdown). I'm not associated, just use it for some time. https://js.wiki/ https://js.wiki/
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    Yeah, wiki.js is in the same space and seems to be pretty great. BookStack and wiki.js have taken quite different design & structure choices though so I usually advise trying out the demos of both to see what best fits.
  - Vaslo 5y ago
    Agree - I self host wiki.js and love it. Easy to figure out.
fnord123 5y ago
Sorry this is nothing like Confluence. On Bookstack you click a link and get a new page instantly. This is nothing like Confluence where you need to wait 5-8 seconds for each page. And no, I will never not shit in Atlassian products until they fix performance. Trello is the standout. Thanks for not trashing it.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  I hear this a lot from people switching from Confluence. I watched a colleague using Confluence once and was surprised how much time was spent looking at those text-placeholder blocks while content was presumably loading in the background.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    My favorite is when elements jump around while they load, so you're guaranteed to misclick on links. So then you'll have to wait again (when going back), because of course the cache hasn't been invented yet.
  - jraph 5y ago
    this reminds me of Bitbucket…
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
robsalasco 5y ago
Would be nice if they can offer a managed version in the near future
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Yeah, this has been requested a few times. I don't come from a hosting background (Outside of managing my own VPSs) so I don't feel it's something I can personally do (at a level of service I'd be happy with) but the idea of partnering with someone that has experience is something I've though about; The tricky part is finding someone I can trust enough to send users to.
  - nwilkens 5y ago
    I'd love to chat more about this! We're a managed cloud infrastructure business (since 2006), and also run our own public cloud.. Reach out to me via nick at mnx io. At a minimum, I'd be happy to give you some pointers in this space.
  - siculars 5y ago
    ^ This right here is a business ^ Helping small ISVs turn their software into SaaS offerings.
    - ssddanbrown 5y ago
      For sure. Honestly, I would love to have an established open-source respecting company like RedHat come along and say "We'll be your official hosting partner, we'll handle hosting, payments and offer these services, we'll need x hours from you per week for support, otherwise focus on the project, we'll give you £x per month, You retain ownership and other revenue streams." A bit idealist and of course the contract would be more complicated, but to focus on the project while having established support would be ideal.
  - satyamkapoor 5y ago
    Would love to help get this up. :)
  - 5y ago
throwaway9492 5y ago
We actually moved from Confluence to Bookstack last year, mainly because the EOL for the Atlassian server-licenses. Sure, it has less features, but the main function, maintaining content by non-tech people works great! Thanks for creating this app.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Good to hear about another successful transition from Confluence!
thecrumb 5y ago
Looks nice. I have an old docuwiki install I need to do something with. Might be time to try something new.
sirodoht 5y ago
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.
- civilized 5y ago
  And Confluence supports collaborative editing.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Does not support this at the moment. Currently rebuilding the editor with a vision to potentially support that in the future although there'd be some hurdles to jump over to get to that point.
- polote 5y ago
  All real Confluence alternative (Confluence is a b2b software not a wiki tool) Notion, Guru, Slab, Slite ... are supporting that since their creation.
  - tin7in 5y ago
    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 https://saga.so) to the list of alternatives.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      It is extremely offputting that Saga doesn't show a single actual product view, the site design makes me think the product is equally ugly, and they require signing up to see a demo? When a company hides the product that much and forces you to only experience it with a tour guide, it's tacit admission the product sucks.
      - tin7in 5y ago
throwaway984393 5y ago
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/ 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 https://www.getoutline.com/compare/confluence-alternative
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  You need to use slack or google for the selfhost setup. Which is non starter for many people.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    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?
  - theelix 5y ago
    Personally I managed to run Outline using a standard OIDC software like Keycloak. While more troublesome it should work just fine without external tools
  - tommoor 5y ago
    Any OIDC compatible authentication provider works now, FWIW
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  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
CPLX 5y ago
Another option I've been considering for a change away from Confluence is Gitbook. Curious to hear if anyone has done an in-depth comparison of these two.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  This can really depend on your use-case and audience. Things like gitbook (& docusaurus) can often be better for focused topics or when serving product documentation to users. BookStack tends to work better as a mixed-topic, mixed-user platform. Along the lines of an internal wiki shared by different teams. I've seen people attempt to use BookStack as a replacement for GitBook but struggle due to the structure being different.
shdisi 5y ago
Thanks for creating and maintaining BookStack. My company has used it for around three years, and recently integrated it with Okta for SSO. It’s fast, simple to use, and the recent search improvements have really made it an excellent product.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Awesome to hear. Especially happy to hear good feedback regarding the search improvements, I spent a good amount of time on those and this is the first feedback I've had since.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Out of interest, does your company support the author via sponsorship or other means? I’m curious… I wondered what the red tape is like in organisations that use open source projects like this in order to setup a GitHub sponsorship or similar. In a previous role at a cash-strapped startup I used open source software within my team and have to admit I never arranged any contributions to the OSS projects - though if I had my time again in that role I’d be more mindful about trying to do this. Especially I think when the project is a very small or “one person” team.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    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/recommendations_on_payingcontributing_to_open/hrcpcns/ https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rwmiwn/recommen...?
    - tailspin2019 5y ago
      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!
throw0101a 5y ago
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 absolutely required. LDAP integration (at least for authentication/LDAP binds) is mandatory, but LDAP group integration (authorization/permissions/roles) isn't mandatory: that can be internal to the app. Wouldn't mind it though: either Unix-style or AD-style (memberOf).
- jraph 5y ago
  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/ https://www.xwiki.org/ [2] https://www.xwiki.com/ https://www.xwiki.com/ [3] https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps [4] https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+bookstack https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+... [5] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ [6] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_content_management/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_con...
polote 5y ago
Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative. Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role. But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a real Confluence alternative
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative. Sure, but there are a lot of people within that range up to tens of thousands. I have had some people mention using BookStack within environments towards to tens of thousands (Although it's likely a lesser portion enganged). Just because it may not achieve that one factor does not discount it as an alternative for significant audience. > Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role. Yeah, we don't have the word usage of "Teams" but I'm not sure what that'd offer in addition to roles. Role specific permissions can be applied to any of the hierarchy elements (Including upon page content).
  - polote 5y ago
    I'm certainly not criticizing BookStack. It actually looks super responsive and have a great set of features to manage knowledge especially for an open source platform. As for roles. In organizations of a certain size, the concept of role is not organization wide, but team-wide. You will set for example the editor role, for some people of the team "Operations". Don't really see how this can be done on BookStack
    - ssddanbrown 5y ago
      Okay, Not sure I still yet fully understand but I'm not really familiar with Confluence so probably just something in my blind spot. Good luck with dokkument! Hope you gain that large-scale enterprise segment!
stevofolife 5y ago
Nice work! What was the hardest technical and non technical part of this?
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > What was the hardest technical That's a tricky one to answer! The authentication systems most likely, just because of the different standards and configuration that different people demand. I've had to learn LDAP, SAML2 and OIDC protocols to a level that allows me to confidently add & maintain these systems. > non technical Probably issue handling & management, from a mental point of view. Dealing with such a range of ideas and requests with an ever-growing list of features/issues/support-request has been tricky. I've had to learn to change my perspective and goals when dealing with GitHub issues. In general the social side has been a massive point of learning and challenge to me. I've recently written about many of these more extensively here: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/qrksgh/bookstack_an_open_source_documentation_platform_i/hk7jl4o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/qrksgh/bookstac...
ulnarkressty 5y ago
Had a look around, this looks really polished. I would have one remark - please consider making tables a first-class feature. In my experience with Confluence, the easiest and most comprehensive way to organize information is with tables. Having a quick way to merge, delete, color cells would be great. Right now, coloring and merging are hidden away in some menus, and deleting cells will shift the bottom toolbar with the table upwards, so you can't do it quickly.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  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.
  - ulnarkressty 5y ago
    It doesn't need to be Word or Excel-levels of options and control, less is actually more - for example table cells in Confluence can only have 6 colors, and no fancy border styles etc. which in my opinion provides a more unified look and feel. Just the UX needs to flow smoothly enough, as working with tabular data consists of doing many of the same steps over and over again.
deleted 5y ago
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rob001 5y ago
How does this compare to wikijs? This looks very good, but I'm already very happy with wikijs.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  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/ https://demo.bookstackapp.com/
ecshafer 5y ago
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.
- polote 5y ago
  > What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that information ends up being organized by TEAMS not by topic It is usually a better idea to organize information by teams than topics in an organization. The reason is that if the tree structure is unknown to most people, they will not be able to find information easily nor to choose the right place to create information. You shouldn't expect everyone to browse the whole documentation to understand how it is structured in order to be able to use it
- Too 5y ago
  Used confluence in several shops and never seen anything like that happen. Sounds terrible. Spaces are usually few and edit for all. Must have been bad admins and management. Doesn’t mean it’s a good product though. Especially the cloud version is progressively worse, especially with regards to performance. Glad to see some competition in the area.
LilBytes 5y ago
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?
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP? Most system changes (Create, Updated, Delete actions) are recorded and displayed in an audit log view for admins. As of the most recentl release, you can trigger webhooks upon any of these; Video example [1]. Changes to pages (where documentation content exists) do have their state changes recorded so you can revert/view/compare across versions of a page. The revision limit is set to 50 by default (I think) but this is configurable. You can login to the demo as an admin to preview these features if needed [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI [2] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/login?email=admin@example.com&password=password https://demo.bookstackapp.com/login?email=admin@example.com&...
  - LilBytes 5y ago
    Thank you very much for the response! :)
LeicaLatte 5y ago
Book stack is very good.
anyfactor 5y ago
I haven't used Confluence or BookStack in this case. Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them? What about login and admin stuff? Also gitbased blog platform like architecture perhaps? I am a big fan of journaling, documentation and having a knowledge hub. I am not sure what is out there for a monolithic yet shared and controllable knowledge hub.
- toper-centage 5y ago
  There's is good versionimg in confluence, and also good search. The editor is also nice (improved a lot since a few years ago). Compared to the mess that is JIRA, I actually like confluence.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them? BookStack does not have git-like versioning but content changes are versioned within the database for rollback/compare/viewing. > What about login and admin stuff? BookStack has multiple authentication options (Including email & password/LDAP/OIDC/SAML2) in addition to admin/user/role controls.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
This looks really nice. Atlassian did not consider small businesses with regulatory requirements when it decided to push everyone to the cloud. Atlassian's cloud cannot ever meet my regulatory requirements, by 2024 I need to replace Confluence. There is no way I can pay for the cost of the Data Center version of Confluence you'll be able to self-host, over $20K/year to self-host Confluence is a non-starter. Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what formats does it support? Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats? Any plans to support Postgres in the future?
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what formats does it support? No, unfortunately not. You can attach files but we only support indexing (And parsing) of core page content. Indexing other formats opens up a large branch of maintenance while adding potential confusion in the platform in regards to what's considered content. > Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats? Yeah, Both can be exported as plaintext, markdown, contained-html or PDF. The PDF export can be troublesome but works for most simple use-cases. > Any plans to support Postgres in the future? Not in sight for the near future. I'm not closed off to it but there are questions of support and maintainership. My detailed thoughts on additional database support can be found here: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecomment-494956958 https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecom...
eyeball 5y ago
My company is forcing a migration from confluence to sharepoint. What a nightmare.
pSYoniK 5y ago
Really enjoy your project! Setting it up on a free Oracle cloud VPS is very straightforward, setting up automated backups is also very easy and restoring is again, very very easy! Thank you for your hard work on this project, it made me start working on my own take on how notes should be handled and it gave me a place to keep things that I find interesting and keep notes on everything I learned throughout uni over the past couple of years. Thanks again, your work is really appreciated!
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Thanks! Interesting to hear about the backups and restore being easy, I often hear complaints due to not having in-app backup/restore but the risk of causing issues, over doing that at an infrastructure level (Via mysqldump/file-copies), has always been a point of worry for me when thinking down the in-app route.
ei8ths 5y ago
one of the things we use confluence for is tagging people to tasks. putting pages underneath pages and when things are checked off they show up on the parent page so employees have all tasks and then the meeting tasks, then plus all the wiki features but the above was what sold us on confluence for doing meetings and minutes. I haven't been able to find something similar.
IceWreck 5y ago
I used to use Dokuwiki as my personal notes app/knowledgebase pretty heavily. Switched to Bookstack two years ago and never looked back. It has everything you need in a Wiki, no third party plugins needed like Dokuwiki. The API is excellent, and I've used it to build some custom stuff. They recently added webhooks too. And Dan is pretty responsive on Discord if you need help.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Always nice to hear happy feedback regarding the API, good to know it's getting some use.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Huh, so that's why the last update of Argon was 2 years ago :-) Thanks for making it! I consider it to be the best theme available for DokuWiki and my organization uses a forked version of it (https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-krypton https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-krypton).
  - IceWreck 5y ago
    Thank you for making this. I added a link to your fork at the top of the repo's README. Please add it to this listing as well https://www.dokuwiki.org/template https://www.dokuwiki.org/template
    - solarkraft 5y ago
      There are still a few things I'd like to fix before really feeling confident in publishing it to the index, but I guess I might as well because it does already provide some value.
amiga-workbench 5y ago
I've been planning on rolling this out at work for months now, just finished setting up a little server for the office to host it on. Its going to help so much.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  That's great, hope it works out well for you!
budafish 5y ago
Some time ago I was trying to transition to platform to help me capture my own personal notes and organise my knowledge. BookStack was a good front runner, but I think the lack of mobile editing along with the hassle of upgrades made me end up using Notion. Now by all means notion isn't perfect at all, but for me who just wanted to start writing notes it seems the right choice at the time. I would like to switch to BookStack as it looks great and is a great product, but the one issue that worries me is when it comes to upgrades and migrations. Generally I found when upgrading database based platforms I end up messing up hugely causing myself a huge headache, and then eventually not upgrading at all. For example I used Monica CRM, and totally botched the upgrades eventually just closing it down and using Google contacts instead. If there was an easy way to solve for that I'd definitely be on board with self-hosting it myself. But at the moment I just don't have the time to resolve upgrade issues :(
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  I can understand that, Especially since Monica and BookStack share the same framework. Database issues do happen unfortunately, although I take changes pretty seriously when approach schema changes. For those that have requested support upon such issues, I've been able to get them up and running again in the vast majority of cases.
unixhero 5y ago
Great software. Use it a lot. Just wish it had backup and restore within the web interface.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  If it only had backup within the interface, would that cover most of your wish? Reason being, I always have troubling thinking about backup AND restore, but mostly because restore is a complicated mess (Especially when you start thinking about going across versions). Just achieving backup within the interface (Of database and uploaded files) is much more feasible.
zekenie 5y ago
It'd be awesome if this thing had mermaidjs support. It's native in obsidian and it's such a game changer
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  This is something that has been requested before, although not something I'd probably look to include in the core project since I attempt to avoid custom formats and syntax where possible. That said, I'd like to get to a point where something like mermaid.js can easily be added if desired. Over the last year the BookStack platform extensibility has grow significantly (API, Webhooks, PHP Hooks, View/Language/Icon Overries) and I'm looking to continue that to achieve such requests without over-stressing the core project itself.
  - davidjgraph 5y ago
    In diagram under Arrange->Insert->Advanced (obviously).
Sheen96 5y ago
Glad to see any alternatives to confluence (or Atlassian in general). I've used Confluence for a good 4 years or so and for the life of me, I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. I can understand it's use somewhat for business folks, but even then, the way of organising things is abysmal, every solution (such as rich text editing) feels very off the shelf/MVP, uninspiring UI, the list goes on. It feels like most companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the end because it's there.
- pm90 5y ago
  > It feels like most companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the end because it's there. Literally the only reason it exists. JIRA is the hook that gets companies on to the rest of the horrible Atlassian stack.
  - kyriakos 5y ago
    As if jira itself is not horrible. But to be fair to jira I recently tried the cloud version which is untouched by any scrum masters or management and its way better than what I have to endure in my day job with hundreds of customizations it has received over the years to shoehorn every kind of metric
- polote 5y ago
  > I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it. Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation files in Confluence. In Confluence, you can put rights, tags, titles, organize in folders, assign owners, put comments, .... Is Confluence good at it ? Not much, but it doesn't mean we should remove Confluence.
  - 5y ago
LeicaLatte 5y ago
Book stack is great!
bogwog 5y ago
As someone who hasn’t used Confluence, how is this different from a regular wiki (e.g. MediaWiki)?
- grogenaut 5y ago
  Wysiwyg editor, integrations with Jira queries and other tools via UI wizards/widgets.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Mediawiki has had a wysiwyg editor for a while now
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  More focused on writing explicit long-form content organized into book-like trees (i.e. book -> chapter -> page), instead of doing things TheWikiWay. It's much nicer for technical documentation IMHO.
- rtpg 5y ago
  It looks nicer than most wiki software out of the box, has nice integrations and editor stuff. So aesthetically it's very pleasing and it's pretty easy to use (the big asterisk is when performance gets in the way and suddenly stuff is slow). In theory I'm sure you could sit around, write a billion plugins to some other wiki software, and get to confluence. But you could also just pay for Confluence! "As nice as Confluence but super speedy" is a ... $50 million dollar business (can't say billion cuz I mean atlassian does good work!)
slickdork 5y ago
I've been using this as a personal wiki for a few years now. Thank you so much for making it! I really love it.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  No problem, thanks for the positive message!
marcodiego 5y ago
Confluence + Jira is a common combination. It is good to have an alternative to one of these. Anyone has info or suggestion on what are good open source alternatives for Jira?
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  Depending on which features you need, Gitlab can be a lightweight replacement. It has good Kanban boards, but does not have custom fields, so everything is done with tags. Also lacks reporting. In places where I work, the switch to Gitlab was intentional to keep things simple. JIRA had become a monster.
- xmprt 5y ago
  Jira is a monster that does way too much but that's probably why everyone uses it - execs hear of all the features it has without thinking about how the end users feel about it. The Jira replacement will depend a lot on the reasons you use Jira and what features you need.
solarkraft 5y ago
I remember considering BookStack while looking for a (surprise) replacement for Confluence. The main thing that led me to stop considering it pretty quickly is precisely the concept of books - I find it both unnecessarily complicated and unnecessarily limiting. My Org now uses DokuWiki. It has a lot of issues (the prosemirror visual editor is a good start, but in beta and out of development, for example). But it's also the least sucking option I've found. Most Wiki software severely screws up the editing experience, which may not be such a good idea when you want to get people to document things. I'm glad Bookstack does this right.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  As a former DokuWiki user (both pro and privately) the biggest issue is when you want to migrate from DokuWiki. I managed to migrate my private docs from DokuWiki to markdown but it wasn't easy and it took some manual editing. I'm much happier knowing that it's in Markdown format simply because of the options that opens up for me.
deleted 5y ago
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zxspectrum1982 5y ago
What about extensibility? A very important reason why people use Confluence and Jira is there's an infinite supply of add-ons to do almost anything you may want to do, and then you can even implement your own. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/confluence https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/confluence
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  In the following comment I've described our methods of extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858602 Nothing user-friendly like confluence but some core systems are available to customize and extend. Of course, since BookStack is open source, some people have taken the option of maintaining a fork with deeper customizations.
arcastroe 5y ago
I looked into a million wiki/documentation projects and my absolute favorite for consumption (reading and navigation) was Docusaurus [1]. The only problem is that Docusaurus is intended for static public documentation, so it does not provide user-accounts or multi-topic content-management that you would expect from bigger wiki-like projects. I wish Docusaurus would expand its scope to serve as a wiki, rather than single-purpose documentation - but I understand these are different use-cases altogether. [1] https://docusaurus.io/docs https://docusaurus.io/docs
bastardoperator 5y ago
Love it, anything to unseat Atlassian tools is a win in my book. This looks and feels great too. Nice work!
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Thank you!
livinglist 5y ago
mad respect
warunsl 5y ago
Wow. What a coincidence. I installed this last night on my NAS. Came to HN to check if this product has been discussed before and there is a discussion from just today! Anyway, I was wondering if there is a plug-in infrastructure for BookStack in on the roadmap? Thank you for the product. Looks neat in the minimum time I have spent on this so far.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  There's no particular "plugin" system. I've always aimed for BookStack to be a "batteries included" system with the essentials built-in and supported with the core. That said, I have been opening up areas for extension, especially over the last year or two. The following systems are now available: - REST API [1] - Webhooks [2] - Visual Theme System [3] (Overrides of any view/translations/icon used). - Logical Theme System [4] (Back-end logical hooks/events/extension). It's possible we could build a common container around these methods to form a "plugin" system but that would require significant time & thought. Not sure I'll ever soon go down that route though due to the cost it could burden upon the project. My current stance is providing opportunities for extension to those who'll be able to maintain it themselves. [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI [3] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/docs/visual-theme-system.md https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do... [4] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/docs/logical-theme-system.md https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do...
johnny_b_g 5y ago
Any hosting offerings? I like that it's OSS, and obviously many will like the option to self-host, however some like to also have the choice of it being hosted (mainly for ease of management/security) - this usually also offers a revenue stream for the project. Quickly looking at it, seems like it would work out better than Confluence, which we've been using, but found it (Confluence) to be slow to fix/implement features.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  No hosting offerings from myself right now although there are a couple of companies offering hosting (One of which is a sponsor on the homepage linked in the post). There was a similar question earlier with my more verbose thoughts in regards to hosting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376
  - johnny_b_g 5y ago
    Ah I missed that - thank you!
badsectoracula 5y ago
From a quick look at the demo it looks nice, however i think that since people are more likely to read than edit, the "Actions" should be lower than the navigation panels. E.g. in this: https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/bookstack-demo-site/page/header-level-examples https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/bookstack-demo-site/page... Instead of "Actions", "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation" it should be "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation", "Actions". Note: this seems to be an issue when the window width isn't too high to put the actions at the right side. I only noticed it after i wrote the above since i use a narrow width for the browser as my monitor is large and it makes it easier to read text. Regardless, in this "narrow mode" i think the actions should be placed after navigation.
palidanx 5y ago
Whoa I can copy/paste images directly into the editor, sweet! One question though, if I deploy a containerized version via docker and upload images, where do the images reside (it seems like the php uploads folder? Just curious if I had to redeploy the image what volumes I might have to mount as back-upp
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  It depends on the container you use, Most seem to provide guidance on what paths you'll need to mount as volumes. I know the linuxserver.io [1] container puts all required files into a single `/config` directory to mount. [1] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-bookstack/ https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-bookstack/
m3adow 5y ago
I looked into Bookstack three years ago when searching a replacement with a better WYSIWYG editor for my DokuWiki instance so my wife could participate in the Wiki. I can't exactly remember, why I did not chose Bookstack, but I was positively impressed with the demo. Nice to see its continuously evolving. I myself chose wiki.js back then.
- afarviral 5y ago
  Similar to you, after some fun trying it out I landed on wik.js. Curious why you did too. For me wiki.js had more capability for importing previously exported pages from OneNote and a more flexible document structure. In the end we went back to confluence though, as wiki.js lacked the capability to change the effective directory path of multiple pages (had to be done one at a time or via the API). I really like both bookstack and wiki.js and they occupy a very similar niche. Do check them both out. My ultimate wiki platform wishlist: comments module, markdown and attachment import/export, extremely fast tree hierarchy editor and renaming, and a good editor that enforces a fully standardized markup. Looks are nice too.
vitro 5y ago
Just trying it out and the simplicity and user friendliness is great. Thank you for such a nice piece of software, we'll give it a try and use it in our company. Is there a way or do you plan to add page translations? Some of our contributors do not speak English and I wonder what is the best approach to have pages translated, apart from creating a copy of a page and keeping all copies in sync.

562 points by ssddanbrown 5y ago

Should also check out MediaWiki. The last year the visual editor is finally included with PHP, making the installation simple: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki https://mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

KennyBlanken 5y ago
A visual editor does not solve mediawiki's bloat which is useless for 99% of anyone who isn't Wikipedia or another large organization, nor MediaWiki being entirely organized around pages. Nor does it solve Mediawiki's ugly, Web 1.0 design. In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file variables. Adding any of a slew of auth methods is trivial in Bookstack. In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date. Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections - not "pages." It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  > It's perfect for what most people and projects need, and it looks fucking gorgeous out of the box to boot. Thank you so much! > In mediawiki it's finding an extension, figuring out how to configure it, and then worrying about keeping it up to date. I've always attempted to be "batteries included" with BookStack due to this frustration. Means we have to be more limited in abilities but hopefully provide a better experience for what we do allow.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > In Bookstack, making the server private is one or two clicks. In mediawiki you have to set at least half a dozen config file variables. This isn't really true. During install process you are asked which you want. If you press the private button when prompted you get a private wiki. If you press public you get public. If you want to change after you installed, you do have to edit a text based config file. You only have to edit two lines, but i appreciate that text based config file is a turn off for some people. > Bookstack is focused on "books", chapters, pages, sections - not "pages." I agree that this is a significant difference from mediawiki. You can do that sort of thing in MediaWiki, but you'll be swimming upstream. [Dislaimer: im a mediawiki developer]
unixhero 5y ago
No not really any point in also checking out MediaWiki. Bookstack has surpassed MediaWiki in usability by leaps and bounds. They are not even comparable any more, aside from being able to do wiki edits they are separate use cases by now.

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

This looks great! One thing which would be useful would be an approver role or step for document creation and updating. In a lot of orgs it's necessary to have someone sign off on changes to sop's

ssddanbrown 5y ago

I've been working on BookStack for over 6 years now, learning a lot about open source project maintainership during that time. Originally developed it while looking for a documentation system for my mixed-technical-skill workplace. Wanted something easy to use without having to get finance involved when increasing our user count. With Confluence backing away from their self-hosted offerings, hopefully many will find BookStack useful. It's not supposed to be a direct replacement, and the design & content structure is quite opinionated, but it can serve many of the same use-cases as Confluence had served.

1cvmask 5y ago
We could potentially add passwordless MFA from saas pass to your project. Good luck with it.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  That's cool. I recently built MFA into the access flow, with a sight to extend methods where needed, although any instance using the SAML/LDAP/OIDC auth options could enforce MFA on the identity provider side.
- philonoist 5y ago
  I apologize but may I know what you mean by "saas pass"?
  - yebyen 5y ago
hardwaresofton 5y ago
Bookstack looks like an amazing feat of engineering — it’s overwhelmingly the wiki I want to deploy given other F/OSS options. just today I was showing it to a friend and it is impressive how clean and considered it is. Thanks for maintaining and improving this project
- 5y ago

tommica 5y ago

Such a nice tool - we use it at work, and the people managing like how simple it us to use!

ssddanbrown 5y ago
That's great to hear, usability has been at the forefront of it's design and development.
npsomaratna 5y ago
Same here. Simple, focused, and easily usable by non-tech people. We adopted Bookstack several years ago, and we've never looked back.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Great to hear it's been used to some longer term success!

tgv 5y ago

Impressive. I'm definitely going to give this a look. Right now, we've got our technical docs in Sharepoint (yeah, that Sharepoint), mixing its built-in docs and Word docs, and I'd really like to get rid of that.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Thanks! My original scenario was a mix of gist code snippets and word docs. The horror is when those word docs are version by file name (server_docs_final-v2.docx). It definitely helps to get things aligned into a platform that people understand how to use.

ukasiu 5y ago

Even simpler Markdown-based: https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/

ssddanbrown 5y ago
I'd say that simplicity can very much depend on audience, use-case and opinion. The design and content structure between platforms appears quite different. BookStack does support Markdown content editing although it is WYSIWYG or Markdown, jumping between the two isn't really supported (Yet, Hoping to achieve this later this year).
pkz 5y ago
One of the benefits of Counfluence is that it is one of the only Wikis where I've seen non-technical people being able to create content on a daily basis. Linking pages, inserting graphs and images just works. I have yet to see that in anything based on markdown.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Yeah, non-technical folk were one of my key audiences for BookStack which most other popular open-source offerings, at the time, seemed to lack focus for. People do love their markdown input though. I'm currently rebuilding the editor; My goal is it have an easy WYSIWYG editor that allows instance back-and-forth switching to Markdown. One of the tricker parts is avoiding obscure/custom markdown syntax for non-common/custom content blocks, as one of my main principals is to ensure user content is portable/non-proprietary.
- tommoor 5y ago
  Outline's editor is similar to Dropbox Paper, Markdown shortcuts work but knowing Markdown isn't a requirement to use it

CPLX 5y ago

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?

ssddanbrown 5y ago
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 possibly offering some form of paid service support service to help the process and help fund the project. [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs
- Aeolun 5y ago
  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.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Confluence import could be a premium feature you could offer.

jethro_tell 5y ago

This looks really good. I've been looking for a good wiki solution. Gonna give this a try in the next few weeks.

drcursor 5y ago

A killer feature would be confluence import. How do the permissions work ? Same way as confluence (inherited) ?

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Sure, See my other comment here in regards to import/migration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852265 I'm not sure how Confluence permissions work. Within BookStack pages (Main content) is generally within a hierarchy of Shelves > Books > Chapters > Pages. Both shelves and chapters are optional parts of the hierarchy,and Books can be members of multiple shelves. General permissions (Edit/Create/Delete) can be controlled per-role, and multiple roles can be assigned to a user. Permissions can then be overridden per hierarchy item. Permissions for Books and Chapters will cascade to child items unless they're overridden.

bloggie 5y ago

I came across your software a few weeks ago when I was looking for some kind of locally hosted collaborative documentation suite for internal use, basically, a wiki that can be used by people who aren’t programmers. I was a bit incredulous when I found that it is basically expected to use markdown if you want to have a wiki. This really raises the barrier to entry and restricts users to ones that are technically proficient and have the time to learn and deal with markdown. Wysiwyg is a necessity. Easy content insertion is also necessary. We haven’t yet integrated bookstack, but I don’t see any alternatives (sticking with the locally hosted requirement)

wwarek 5y ago
Not sure if this fully fits your needs but you might want to look at Wiki.js. You can self host it, has WYSIWYG editor available (as well as HTML and markdown). I'm not associated, just use it for some time. https://js.wiki/ https://js.wiki/
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  Yeah, wiki.js is in the same space and seems to be pretty great. BookStack and wiki.js have taken quite different design & structure choices though so I usually advise trying out the demos of both to see what best fits.
- Vaslo 5y ago
  Agree - I self host wiki.js and love it. Easy to figure out.

fnord123 5y ago

Sorry this is nothing like Confluence. On Bookstack you click a link and get a new page instantly. This is nothing like Confluence where you need to wait 5-8 seconds for each page. And no, I will never not shit in Atlassian products until they fix performance. Trello is the standout. Thanks for not trashing it.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
I hear this a lot from people switching from Confluence. I watched a colleague using Confluence once and was surprised how much time was spent looking at those text-placeholder blocks while content was presumably loading in the background.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  My favorite is when elements jump around while they load, so you're guaranteed to misclick on links. So then you'll have to wait again (when going back), because of course the cache hasn't been invented yet.
- jraph 5y ago
  this reminds me of Bitbucket…
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

robsalasco 5y ago

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

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Yeah, this has been requested a few times. I don't come from a hosting background (Outside of managing my own VPSs) so I don't feel it's something I can personally do (at a level of service I'd be happy with) but the idea of partnering with someone that has experience is something I've though about; The tricky part is finding someone I can trust enough to send users to.
- nwilkens 5y ago
  I'd love to chat more about this! We're a managed cloud infrastructure business (since 2006), and also run our own public cloud.. Reach out to me via nick at mnx io. At a minimum, I'd be happy to give you some pointers in this space.
- siculars 5y ago
  ^ This right here is a business ^ Helping small ISVs turn their software into SaaS offerings.
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    For sure. Honestly, I would love to have an established open-source respecting company like RedHat come along and say "We'll be your official hosting partner, we'll handle hosting, payments and offer these services, we'll need x hours from you per week for support, otherwise focus on the project, we'll give you £x per month, You retain ownership and other revenue streams." A bit idealist and of course the contract would be more complicated, but to focus on the project while having established support would be ideal.
- satyamkapoor 5y ago
  Would love to help get this up. :)
- 5y ago

throwaway9492 5y ago

We actually moved from Confluence to Bookstack last year, mainly because the EOL for the Atlassian server-licenses. Sure, it has less features, but the main function, maintaining content by non-tech people works great! Thanks for creating this app.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Good to hear about another successful transition from Confluence!

thecrumb 5y ago

Looks nice. I have an old docuwiki install I need to do something with. Might be time to try something new.

sirodoht 5y ago

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.

civilized 5y ago
And Confluence supports collaborative editing.
ssddanbrown 5y ago
Does not support this at the moment. Currently rebuilding the editor with a vision to potentially support that in the future although there'd be some hurdles to jump over to get to that point.
polote 5y ago
All real Confluence alternative (Confluence is a b2b software not a wiki tool) Notion, Guru, Slab, Slite ... are supporting that since their creation.
- tin7in 5y ago
  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 https://saga.so) to the list of alternatives.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    It is extremely offputting that Saga doesn't show a single actual product view, the site design makes me think the product is equally ugly, and they require signing up to see a demo? When a company hides the product that much and forces you to only experience it with a tour guide, it's tacit admission the product sucks.
    - tin7in 5y ago

throwaway984393 5y ago

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/ 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 https://www.getoutline.com/compare/confluence-alternative

NmAmDa 5y ago
You need to use slack or google for the selfhost setup. Which is non starter for many people.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  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?
- theelix 5y ago
  Personally I managed to run Outline using a standard OIDC software like Keycloak. While more troublesome it should work just fine without external tools
- tommoor 5y ago
  Any OIDC compatible authentication provider works now, FWIW
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
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

CPLX 5y ago

Another option I've been considering for a change away from Confluence is Gitbook. Curious to hear if anyone has done an in-depth comparison of these two.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
This can really depend on your use-case and audience. Things like gitbook (& docusaurus) can often be better for focused topics or when serving product documentation to users. BookStack tends to work better as a mixed-topic, mixed-user platform. Along the lines of an internal wiki shared by different teams. I've seen people attempt to use BookStack as a replacement for GitBook but struggle due to the structure being different.

shdisi 5y ago

Thanks for creating and maintaining BookStack. My company has used it for around three years, and recently integrated it with Okta for SSO. It’s fast, simple to use, and the recent search improvements have really made it an excellent product.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Awesome to hear. Especially happy to hear good feedback regarding the search improvements, I spent a good amount of time on those and this is the first feedback I've had since.
tailspin2019 5y ago
Out of interest, does your company support the author via sponsorship or other means? I’m curious… I wondered what the red tape is like in organisations that use open source projects like this in order to setup a GitHub sponsorship or similar. In a previous role at a cash-strapped startup I used open source software within my team and have to admit I never arranged any contributions to the OSS projects - though if I had my time again in that role I’d be more mindful about trying to do this. Especially I think when the project is a very small or “one person” team.
- ssddanbrown 5y ago
  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/recommendations_on_payingcontributing_to_open/hrcpcns/ https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rwmiwn/recommen...?
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    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!

throw0101a 5y ago

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 absolutely required. LDAP integration (at least for authentication/LDAP binds) is mandatory, but LDAP group integration (authorization/permissions/roles) isn't mandatory: that can be internal to the app. Wouldn't mind it though: either Unix-style or AD-style (memberOf).

jraph 5y ago
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/ https://www.xwiki.org/ [2] https://www.xwiki.com/ https://www.xwiki.com/ [3] https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps [4] https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+bookstack https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+... [5] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ [6] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_content_management/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_con...

polote 5y ago

Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative. Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role. But I'm certainly biased as I'm building a real Confluence alternative

ssddanbrown 5y ago
> Maybe BookStack can do fine for a company with a few dozens of employees. But Confluence can handle tens of thousands of employees. So I wouldn't label Bookstack as a Confluence alternative. Sure, but there are a lot of people within that range up to tens of thousands. I have had some people mention using BookStack within environments towards to tens of thousands (Although it's likely a lesser portion enganged). Just because it may not achieve that one factor does not discount it as an alternative for significant audience. > Maybe I'm missing something, but BookStack doesn't even have a notion of "teams" only roles. You can't give permission of a file to a user, only to all users who have a certain role. Yeah, we don't have the word usage of "Teams" but I'm not sure what that'd offer in addition to roles. Role specific permissions can be applied to any of the hierarchy elements (Including upon page content).
- polote 5y ago
  I'm certainly not criticizing BookStack. It actually looks super responsive and have a great set of features to manage knowledge especially for an open source platform. As for roles. In organizations of a certain size, the concept of role is not organization wide, but team-wide. You will set for example the editor role, for some people of the team "Operations". Don't really see how this can be done on BookStack
  - ssddanbrown 5y ago
    Okay, Not sure I still yet fully understand but I'm not really familiar with Confluence so probably just something in my blind spot. Good luck with dokkument! Hope you gain that large-scale enterprise segment!

stevofolife 5y ago

Nice work! What was the hardest technical and non technical part of this?

ssddanbrown 5y ago
> What was the hardest technical That's a tricky one to answer! The authentication systems most likely, just because of the different standards and configuration that different people demand. I've had to learn LDAP, SAML2 and OIDC protocols to a level that allows me to confidently add & maintain these systems. > non technical Probably issue handling & management, from a mental point of view. Dealing with such a range of ideas and requests with an ever-growing list of features/issues/support-request has been tricky. I've had to learn to change my perspective and goals when dealing with GitHub issues. In general the social side has been a massive point of learning and challenge to me. I've recently written about many of these more extensively here: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/qrksgh/bookstack_an_open_source_documentation_platform_i/hk7jl4o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/qrksgh/bookstac...

ulnarkressty 5y ago

Had a look around, this looks really polished. I would have one remark - please consider making tables a first-class feature. In my experience with Confluence, the easiest and most comprehensive way to organize information is with tables. Having a quick way to merge, delete, color cells would be great. Right now, coloring and merging are hidden away in some menus, and deleting cells will shift the bottom toolbar with the table upwards, so you can't do it quickly.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
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.
- ulnarkressty 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be Word or Excel-levels of options and control, less is actually more - for example table cells in Confluence can only have 6 colors, and no fancy border styles etc. which in my opinion provides a more unified look and feel. Just the UX needs to flow smoothly enough, as working with tabular data consists of doing many of the same steps over and over again.

deleted 5y ago

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rob001 5y ago

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

ssddanbrown 5y ago
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/ https://demo.bookstackapp.com/

ecshafer 5y ago

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.

polote 5y ago
> What typically seems to happen in confluence shops is that information ends up being organized by TEAMS not by topic It is usually a better idea to organize information by teams than topics in an organization. The reason is that if the tree structure is unknown to most people, they will not be able to find information easily nor to choose the right place to create information. You shouldn't expect everyone to browse the whole documentation to understand how it is structured in order to be able to use it
Too 5y ago
Used confluence in several shops and never seen anything like that happen. Sounds terrible. Spaces are usually few and edit for all. Must have been bad admins and management. Doesn’t mean it’s a good product though. Especially the cloud version is progressively worse, especially with regards to performance. Glad to see some competition in the area.

LilBytes 5y ago

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?

ssddanbrown 5y ago
> Are these changes tracked in a history page for version control by any chance, ssdanbrown/OP? Most system changes (Create, Updated, Delete actions) are recorded and displayed in an audit log view for admins. As of the most recentl release, you can trigger webhooks upon any of these; Video example [1]. Changes to pages (where documentation content exists) do have their state changes recorded so you can revert/view/compare across versions of a page. The revision limit is set to 50 by default (I think) but this is configurable. You can login to the demo as an admin to preview these features if needed [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI [2] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/login?email=admin@example.com&password=password https://demo.bookstackapp.com/login?email=admin@example.com&...
- LilBytes 5y ago
  Thank you very much for the response! :)

LeicaLatte 5y ago

Book stack is very good.

anyfactor 5y ago

I haven't used Confluence or BookStack in this case. Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them? What about login and admin stuff? Also gitbased blog platform like architecture perhaps? I am a big fan of journaling, documentation and having a knowledge hub. I am not sure what is out there for a monolithic yet shared and controllable knowledge hub.

toper-centage 5y ago
There's is good versionimg in confluence, and also good search. The editor is also nice (improved a lot since a few years ago). Compared to the mess that is JIRA, I actually like confluence.
ssddanbrown 5y ago
> Does these platforms have git like version controlling and collaboration in them? BookStack does not have git-like versioning but content changes are versioned within the database for rollback/compare/viewing. > What about login and admin stuff? BookStack has multiple authentication options (Including email & password/LDAP/OIDC/SAML2) in addition to admin/user/role controls.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

This looks really nice. Atlassian did not consider small businesses with regulatory requirements when it decided to push everyone to the cloud. Atlassian's cloud cannot ever meet my regulatory requirements, by 2024 I need to replace Confluence. There is no way I can pay for the cost of the Data Center version of Confluence you'll be able to self-host, over $20K/year to self-host Confluence is a non-starter. Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what formats does it support? Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats? Any plans to support Postgres in the future?

ssddanbrown 5y ago
> Does BookStack index uploaded files for search? If so, what formats does it support? No, unfortunately not. You can attach files but we only support indexing (And parsing) of core page content. Indexing other formats opens up a large branch of maintenance while adding potential confusion in the platform in regards to what's considered content. > Can pages (or books) be exported in common formats? Yeah, Both can be exported as plaintext, markdown, contained-html or PDF. The PDF export can be troublesome but works for most simple use-cases. > Any plans to support Postgres in the future? Not in sight for the near future. I'm not closed off to it but there are questions of support and maintainership. My detailed thoughts on additional database support can be found here: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecomment-494956958 https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/76#issuecom...

eyeball 5y ago

My company is forcing a migration from confluence to sharepoint. What a nightmare.

pSYoniK 5y ago

Really enjoy your project! Setting it up on a free Oracle cloud VPS is very straightforward, setting up automated backups is also very easy and restoring is again, very very easy! Thank you for your hard work on this project, it made me start working on my own take on how notes should be handled and it gave me a place to keep things that I find interesting and keep notes on everything I learned throughout uni over the past couple of years. Thanks again, your work is really appreciated!

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Thanks! Interesting to hear about the backups and restore being easy, I often hear complaints due to not having in-app backup/restore but the risk of causing issues, over doing that at an infrastructure level (Via mysqldump/file-copies), has always been a point of worry for me when thinking down the in-app route.

ei8ths 5y ago

one of the things we use confluence for is tagging people to tasks. putting pages underneath pages and when things are checked off they show up on the parent page so employees have all tasks and then the meeting tasks, then plus all the wiki features but the above was what sold us on confluence for doing meetings and minutes. I haven't been able to find something similar.

IceWreck 5y ago

I used to use Dokuwiki as my personal notes app/knowledgebase pretty heavily. Switched to Bookstack two years ago and never looked back. It has everything you need in a Wiki, no third party plugins needed like Dokuwiki. The API is excellent, and I've used it to build some custom stuff. They recently added webhooks too. And Dan is pretty responsive on Discord if you need help.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Always nice to hear happy feedback regarding the API, good to know it's getting some use.
solarkraft 5y ago
Huh, so that's why the last update of Argon was 2 years ago :-) Thanks for making it! I consider it to be the best theme available for DokuWiki and my organization uses a forked version of it (https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-krypton https://github.com/fablab-luenen/dokuwiki-krypton).
- IceWreck 5y ago
  Thank you for making this. I added a link to your fork at the top of the repo's README. Please add it to this listing as well https://www.dokuwiki.org/template https://www.dokuwiki.org/template
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    There are still a few things I'd like to fix before really feeling confident in publishing it to the index, but I guess I might as well because it does already provide some value.

amiga-workbench 5y ago

I've been planning on rolling this out at work for months now, just finished setting up a little server for the office to host it on. Its going to help so much.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
That's great, hope it works out well for you!

budafish 5y ago

Some time ago I was trying to transition to platform to help me capture my own personal notes and organise my knowledge. BookStack was a good front runner, but I think the lack of mobile editing along with the hassle of upgrades made me end up using Notion. Now by all means notion isn't perfect at all, but for me who just wanted to start writing notes it seems the right choice at the time. I would like to switch to BookStack as it looks great and is a great product, but the one issue that worries me is when it comes to upgrades and migrations. Generally I found when upgrading database based platforms I end up messing up hugely causing myself a huge headache, and then eventually not upgrading at all. For example I used Monica CRM, and totally botched the upgrades eventually just closing it down and using Google contacts instead. If there was an easy way to solve for that I'd definitely be on board with self-hosting it myself. But at the moment I just don't have the time to resolve upgrade issues :(

ssddanbrown 5y ago
I can understand that, Especially since Monica and BookStack share the same framework. Database issues do happen unfortunately, although I take changes pretty seriously when approach schema changes. For those that have requested support upon such issues, I've been able to get them up and running again in the vast majority of cases.

unixhero 5y ago

Great software. Use it a lot. Just wish it had backup and restore within the web interface.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
If it only had backup within the interface, would that cover most of your wish? Reason being, I always have troubling thinking about backup AND restore, but mostly because restore is a complicated mess (Especially when you start thinking about going across versions). Just achieving backup within the interface (Of database and uploaded files) is much more feasible.

zekenie 5y ago

It'd be awesome if this thing had mermaidjs support. It's native in obsidian and it's such a game changer

ssddanbrown 5y ago
This is something that has been requested before, although not something I'd probably look to include in the core project since I attempt to avoid custom formats and syntax where possible. That said, I'd like to get to a point where something like mermaid.js can easily be added if desired. Over the last year the BookStack platform extensibility has grow significantly (API, Webhooks, PHP Hooks, View/Language/Icon Overries) and I'm looking to continue that to achieve such requests without over-stressing the core project itself.
- davidjgraph 5y ago
  In diagram under Arrange->Insert->Advanced (obviously).

Sheen96 5y ago

Glad to see any alternatives to confluence (or Atlassian in general). I've used Confluence for a good 4 years or so and for the life of me, I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. I can understand it's use somewhat for business folks, but even then, the way of organising things is abysmal, every solution (such as rich text editing) feels very off the shelf/MVP, uninspiring UI, the list goes on. It feels like most companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the end because it's there.

pm90 5y ago
> It feels like most companies that use it already use the Atlassian stack of JIRA/Bitbucket, then feel the need to tack Confluence onto the end because it's there. Literally the only reason it exists. JIRA is the hook that gets companies on to the rest of the horrible Atlassian stack.
- kyriakos 5y ago
  As if jira itself is not horrible. But to be fair to jira I recently tried the cloud version which is untouched by any scrum masters or management and its way better than what I have to endure in my day job with hundreds of customizations it has received over the years to shoehorn every kind of metric
polote 5y ago
> I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo. Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it. Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation files in Confluence. In Confluence, you can put rights, tags, titles, organize in folders, assign owners, put comments, .... Is Confluence good at it ? Not much, but it doesn't mean we should remove Confluence.
- 5y ago

LeicaLatte 5y ago

Book stack is great!

bogwog 5y ago

As someone who hasn’t used Confluence, how is this different from a regular wiki (e.g. MediaWiki)?

grogenaut 5y ago
Wysiwyg editor, integrations with Jira queries and other tools via UI wizards/widgets.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Mediawiki has had a wysiwyg editor for a while now
qbasic_forever 5y ago
More focused on writing explicit long-form content organized into book-like trees (i.e. book -> chapter -> page), instead of doing things TheWikiWay. It's much nicer for technical documentation IMHO.
rtpg 5y ago
It looks nicer than most wiki software out of the box, has nice integrations and editor stuff. So aesthetically it's very pleasing and it's pretty easy to use (the big asterisk is when performance gets in the way and suddenly stuff is slow). In theory I'm sure you could sit around, write a billion plugins to some other wiki software, and get to confluence. But you could also just pay for Confluence! "As nice as Confluence but super speedy" is a ... $50 million dollar business (can't say billion cuz I mean atlassian does good work!)

slickdork 5y ago

I've been using this as a personal wiki for a few years now. Thank you so much for making it! I really love it.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
No problem, thanks for the positive message!

marcodiego 5y ago

Confluence + Jira is a common combination. It is good to have an alternative to one of these. Anyone has info or suggestion on what are good open source alternatives for Jira?

mgbmtl 5y ago
Depending on which features you need, Gitlab can be a lightweight replacement. It has good Kanban boards, but does not have custom fields, so everything is done with tags. Also lacks reporting. In places where I work, the switch to Gitlab was intentional to keep things simple. JIRA had become a monster.
xmprt 5y ago
Jira is a monster that does way too much but that's probably why everyone uses it - execs hear of all the features it has without thinking about how the end users feel about it. The Jira replacement will depend a lot on the reasons you use Jira and what features you need.

solarkraft 5y ago

I remember considering BookStack while looking for a (surprise) replacement for Confluence. The main thing that led me to stop considering it pretty quickly is precisely the concept of books - I find it both unnecessarily complicated and unnecessarily limiting. My Org now uses DokuWiki. It has a lot of issues (the prosemirror visual editor is a good start, but in beta and out of development, for example). But it's also the least sucking option I've found. Most Wiki software severely screws up the editing experience, which may not be such a good idea when you want to get people to document things. I'm glad Bookstack does this right.

INTPenis 5y ago
As a former DokuWiki user (both pro and privately) the biggest issue is when you want to migrate from DokuWiki. I managed to migrate my private docs from DokuWiki to markdown but it wasn't easy and it took some manual editing. I'm much happier knowing that it's in Markdown format simply because of the options that opens up for me.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zxspectrum1982 5y ago

What about extensibility? A very important reason why people use Confluence and Jira is there's an infinite supply of add-ons to do almost anything you may want to do, and then you can even implement your own. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/confluence https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/confluence

ssddanbrown 5y ago
In the following comment I've described our methods of extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858602 Nothing user-friendly like confluence but some core systems are available to customize and extend. Of course, since BookStack is open source, some people have taken the option of maintaining a fork with deeper customizations.

arcastroe 5y ago

I looked into a million wiki/documentation projects and my absolute favorite for consumption (reading and navigation) was Docusaurus [1]. The only problem is that Docusaurus is intended for static public documentation, so it does not provide user-accounts or multi-topic content-management that you would expect from bigger wiki-like projects. I wish Docusaurus would expand its scope to serve as a wiki, rather than single-purpose documentation - but I understand these are different use-cases altogether. [1] https://docusaurus.io/docs https://docusaurus.io/docs

bastardoperator 5y ago

Love it, anything to unseat Atlassian tools is a win in my book. This looks and feels great too. Nice work!

ssddanbrown 5y ago
Thank you!

livinglist 5y ago

mad respect

warunsl 5y ago

Wow. What a coincidence. I installed this last night on my NAS. Came to HN to check if this product has been discussed before and there is a discussion from just today! Anyway, I was wondering if there is a plug-in infrastructure for BookStack in on the roadmap? Thank you for the product. Looks neat in the minimum time I have spent on this so far.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
There's no particular "plugin" system. I've always aimed for BookStack to be a "batteries included" system with the essentials built-in and supported with the core. That said, I have been opening up areas for extension, especially over the last year or two. The following systems are now available: - REST API [1] - Webhooks [2] - Visual Theme System [3] (Overrides of any view/translations/icon used). - Logical Theme System [4] (Back-end logical hooks/events/extension). It's possible we could build a common container around these methods to form a "plugin" system but that would require significant time & thought. Not sure I'll ever soon go down that route though due to the cost it could burden upon the project. My current stance is providing opportunities for extension to those who'll be able to maintain it themselves. [1] https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs https://demo.bookstackapp.com/api/docs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zIp1ruGpoI [3] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/docs/visual-theme-system.md https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do... [4] https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/docs/logical-theme-system.md https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/blob/master/dev/do...

johnny_b_g 5y ago

Any hosting offerings? I like that it's OSS, and obviously many will like the option to self-host, however some like to also have the choice of it being hosted (mainly for ease of management/security) - this usually also offers a revenue stream for the project. Quickly looking at it, seems like it would work out better than Confluence, which we've been using, but found it (Confluence) to be slow to fix/implement features.

ssddanbrown 5y ago
No hosting offerings from myself right now although there are a couple of companies offering hosting (One of which is a sponsor on the homepage linked in the post). There was a similar question earlier with my more verbose thoughts in regards to hosting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852376
- johnny_b_g 5y ago
  Ah I missed that - thank you!

badsectoracula 5y ago

From a quick look at the demo it looks nice, however i think that since people are more likely to read than edit, the "Actions" should be lower than the navigation panels. E.g. in this: https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/bookstack-demo-site/page/header-level-examples https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/bookstack-demo-site/page... Instead of "Actions", "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation" it should be "Page Navigation", "Book Navigation", "Actions". Note: this seems to be an issue when the window width isn't too high to put the actions at the right side. I only noticed it after i wrote the above since i use a narrow width for the browser as my monitor is large and it makes it easier to read text. Regardless, in this "narrow mode" i think the actions should be placed after navigation.

palidanx 5y ago

Whoa I can copy/paste images directly into the editor, sweet! One question though, if I deploy a containerized version via docker and upload images, where do the images reside (it seems like the php uploads folder? Just curious if I had to redeploy the image what volumes I might have to mount as back-upp

ssddanbrown 5y ago
It depends on the container you use, Most seem to provide guidance on what paths you'll need to mount as volumes. I know the linuxserver.io [1] container puts all required files into a single `/config` directory to mount. [1] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-bookstack/ https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-bookstack/

m3adow 5y ago

I looked into Bookstack three years ago when searching a replacement with a better WYSIWYG editor for my DokuWiki instance so my wife could participate in the Wiki. I can't exactly remember, why I did not chose Bookstack, but I was positively impressed with the demo. Nice to see its continuously evolving. I myself chose wiki.js back then.

afarviral 5y ago
Similar to you, after some fun trying it out I landed on wik.js. Curious why you did too. For me wiki.js had more capability for importing previously exported pages from OneNote and a more flexible document structure. In the end we went back to confluence though, as wiki.js lacked the capability to change the effective directory path of multiple pages (had to be done one at a time or via the API). I really like both bookstack and wiki.js and they occupy a very similar niche. Do check them both out. My ultimate wiki platform wishlist: comments module, markdown and attachment import/export, extremely fast tree hierarchy editor and renaming, and a good editor that enforces a fully standardized markup. Looks are nice too.

vitro 5y ago

Just trying it out and the simplicity and user friendliness is great. Thank you for such a nice piece of software, we'll give it a try and use it in our company. Is there a way or do you plan to add page translations? Some of our contributors do not speak English and I wonder what is the best approach to have pages translated, apart from creating a copy of a page and keeping all copies in sync.