In this article we will see what is a wiki software, its uses and applications, the best wiki software with premium, free and opensource wiki options.
What is Wiki Software?
Wiki software is a type of software/app that enables you to create a website or platform called ‘Wikis’ where you can collaboratively create, edit and manage content.
With the help of wiki software, people can collaboratively create, edit, and share content on the Wiki.
Wiki software is also known as a wiki engine or wiki platform. A wiki website allows multiple users to contribute and modify its content using a simplified markup language or an easy-to-use web-based interface.
Wiki software provides a platform for users to create and organize company knowledge, create project documentation, and other collaborative environments.
A ‘wiki software’ is a software which is used to create a collaborative environment known as a “Wiki”.
Note: Sometimes a Wiki is misspelled as ‘Wikki’, example people search the web for a “Personal Wikki’.
If you are interested in creating an internal wiki website, you should read our guide to creating an internal wiki website using WordPress.
Uses of Wiki Software
You could use a wiki software on a public-facing wiki, private network wiki or a personal wiki. Wiki software can be used in different ways based on use cases. They are,
- As an internal wiki software for your team collaboration
- As an enterprise / corporate wiki software for storing and sharing your company’s knowledge
- A classroom wiki software for teachers to share materials with students
- As a simple personal wiki software for taking notes
Best Wiki Software
There are many wiki tools to choose from. We have reviewed some of the best ones based on social forums like Reddit and Quora. They range from free and open-source wiki software to premium wikis.
Premium Wiki Software
These wiki software require payment. They can be self-hosted software (you need separate hosting) or hosted software as a service (SAAS). The advantage of getting a premium tool is that you get dedicated support instead of just community support.
Note: You can skip this part if you don’t want to pay for a wiki software and go to the free and open-source wiki software list.
Helpie Wiki – Wiki Software as a WordPress Plugin
Meet Helpie Wiki, the modern, powerful and affordable wiki software.
Helpie Wiki is a WordPress plugin that adds wiki features to the WordPress CMS. WordPress is flexible and easy to extend with thousands of plugins and themes. Helpie Wiki is the only WordPress plugin that lets you create a fully collaborative wiki.
If you are new to WordPress, check out our tutorial on how to get started with WordPress in 5 minutes.
Helpie Wiki can be a smart and affordable alternative to free open source wiki software and costly hosted wiki software. That’s why many users of MediaWiki and Confluence have switched to Helpie Wiki.
Helpie is the most affordable at $59 / year / site.
Helpie – Wiki features
- Access Restriction and Publishing capabilities: control who can view, write, edit, moderate and publish content at different levels. We call it Dynamic Capabilities. It’s awesome. Learn More.
- Revision system with unlimited revision.
- Front-end editor for wiki content creation and editing that is Rich Text and Media editor
- Auto-linking of articles by keywords
- Unlimited Styling Options. See some of the demos made with Helpie’s settings.
Pros:
- Easy and intuitive to use and affordable compared to enterprise wiki solutions like Confluence
- Beginner friendly, no coding required
- Text and Media-rich editor, no markup language
- Access to many plugins and themes for WordPress, many are free and its easy to write custom code for WordPress
- Dedicated customer support team and service for setting up your wiki
- Can be hosted on Linux and Windows web servers
- Easy to migrate from Mediawiki or other platforms
- Actively developed and new features added
Cons:
- WordPress may not seem like a wiki tool as it was originally a blogging CMS, but it has evolved a lot
- Developers who prefer markup language may not like rich text editors
- Using WordPress on Microsoft web platforms may need more effort.
Here’s a shorter guide to set up your wiki website with Helpie KB – WordPress Wiki Plugin.
You can also use it on a local server with Flywheel or other tools.
Document360
Document360 is a SAAS wiki software for companies. It has a variety of useful features including WYSIWYG interface, granular access control for documents, article history / rollback and more.
Document360 is wiki which integrates with other platforms like Slack, Drift and more.
Document360 is $149 / project / month
Nuclino – Great as Internal Wiki Software
Nuclino is a modern, fast cloud based wiki for teams and companies to organise their documents. Nuclino is minimal and has a lower learning curve for new users.
Nuclino has 4 unique views to organise and navigate information:
- List View: Organising docs and knowledge
- Board View: Managing tasks
- Graph View: Managing knowledge as graphs
- Table View: Filtering and Handling data
Nuclino costs $5 / user / month
Slite
Slite is a modern wiki software that has a free tier. The free tier allows upto 50 docs.
Slite also integrations with hundreds of other apps including Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, Youtube, etc. Slite also provides Ask, a AI based answering solution from the data in the knowledge base.
There are a lot more features in Slites which you can checkout here. Slite also provides desktop and mobile apps.
Slite Standard costs $8 / user / month.
Confluence wiki
Confluence is a collaboration software by Atlassian, the company behind JIRA, HipChat, and Bitbucket. It has spaces for sharing content and connecting teams. It is an enterprise wiki software with pricing based on user numbers. The hosted wiki costs $5 per user, and the self-hosted wiki has a one-time price per user.
Pros of Confluence Wiki:
- Confluence is easy and intuitive to use
- It has document inline commenting
- It integrates with other Atlassian tools and many work tools
Cons of Confluence Wiki:
- It is very expensive. You pay for every new user in both the hosted and self-hosted versions.
- It uses spaces, which many users don’t like.
- The search is not good. It’s hard to find content with the search bar. Many users have complained about the bad search experience.
- It has a plugin architecture, but it’s not easy to develop a plugin for Confluence.
Also see Best Knowledge Base Software
Other Premium Wiki Software Solutions
Several companies give hosted wiki solutions as a SAAS product. Mostly they have a basic free plan, and premium plans are paid a monthly or yearly subscriptions.
Microsoft has given some hosted wiki software like Sharepoint (used as Enterprise wiki and Team wiki) and Onenote which integrates with Microsoft Office to create a web-based collaborative platform.
There are also other types of hosted wiki software like Notion, Evernote, etc.,
Best Free and Open Source Wiki software
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is the most popular wiki software and best open source wiki software available on the internet. It is a good option for company intranets especially if you are running large projects and going to handle a high number of contents. For example, it is the wiki software running on Wikipedia, and so you know that it can manage large projects.
Click here to get dedicated wiki hosting.
The core software lacks built-in functionality, but there are many extensions available. You can even hire a developer to get your wiki customized.
Pros of MediaWiki:
- It can handle large projects.
- There’s a reasonably large community of people who can provide support and extensions for MediaWiki
- It can be installed on Linux as well as Windows platform and uses PHP and MySQL/ MariaDB
- If you like using a Markup language, you will love it
Cons of MediaWiki:
- The user interface is not very intuitive and beginner friendly.
- It doesn’t have page level access restriction.
- It uses Wiki Markup language, and so non-programmers may not like to use it (WYSIWYG editor available as an extension)
- No dedicated support to ask for help. You need to hire an expert
DokuWiki
DokuWiki is a simple wiki software which is best suitable for creating and managing documentation. It is easy to manage and restrict teams and work-groups with DokuWiki. It does lack some advanced features compared to other wiki software, but it shines in its user-friendliness.
Pros of DokuWiki:
- There’s a vast number of plugins and extensions to extend its functionality.
- It has a markdown language which is simpler to use.
- It stores everything in plain-text.
Cons of DokuWiki:
- Since it doesn’t use a database, it is not recommended for sites with high-traffic.
- Even small things like Rich-text (WYSIWYG) editor and adding categories requires a plugin, and this can quickly lead to managing lots of plugins
- Since it stores everything as plain text adding media requires plugins.
Tiki Wiki
Tiki is an open-source Groupware and Content Management System (CMS) for creating a wiki platform with additional functionality. Though it is mainly a collaboration tool, it can also be used to create websites and intranets, for forums, chat rooms, blog, and image gallery, calendar, and much more. So you will be able to grow your encyclopedia into something greater.
Pros of Tiki Wiki:
- You can generate RSS feeds for your wiki.
- It has options to set up a group and user-specific calendars.
- You can make use of a tracking system for group projects.
Cons of Tiki Wiki:
- The interface is looks rather old, and it is not intuitive.
- Since it has so much stuff built-in, it can be overwhelming and unnecessary for people looking for a simple wiki software
- Though it has many features as a whole; the individual capability of each function is limited.
Free Wiki Software – Honorable mentions
There are some other open source wiki software which are popular but they didn’t meet our criteria.
TiddlyWiki and ZimWiki are great for people looking for personal wiki software. Both are great for taking notes.
BookStack – is a free and open-source wiki that have authentication integration with login providers such as such as GitHub, Google, Slack, AzureAD, Okta and LADP.
FosWiki is a free, open-source entriprise wiki software with a good development and support community and also provides many useful extensions.
What do you think about the tools which we have mentioned here? What wiki software do you use? Please tell us in the small survey below.
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Thank you.
Our RSS feed is working fine.
what is with wiki js?
Wiki.js is a modern alternative for traditional open-source wiki software like MediaWiki. Has decent access control and search function. But it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor. You could use it for a personal wiki. Wouldn’t recommend it for a company or enterprise wiki.
Using it successfully since early 2020 for some private project. Also wouldn’t recommend it for enterprise use but it does have WYSIWYG capability. Very easy setup, looking good and running stable.
Great work , I need this thanks .
Feels like you’ve never heard of https://www.xwiki.org
Hi Nick,
We do know about XWiki.
But it has a very small user base about 5000. So we didn’t mention it.
If you want to say something about XWiki you are welcome to add it in this comments section.
Hi
If you use mediawiki you need to install many extensions yourself. like
Lucene for full text search, WYSIWHG-editor, syntax highlighting, etc etc…
Mediawiki is great but needs tweaking in a professional environment.
Better is to use Bluespice. https://bluespice.com/
is contains all you need, it contains a mediawiki LTS and many stable extensions.
easy to install.
Cheers
Thank you! It was very useful
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Mediawiki is used for very large wiki encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia and HandWiki. So this software can hold up to 5M entries. Not sure how other wiki software can be scaled. Probably, DokuWiki cannot be scaled to this volume of articles since it is file based.
This is a great article! Really thorough in the comparisons and break downs. Another tool worth mentioning here is Spekit. It is an in-app learning tool that has easy to find knowledge in the wiki, free out of the box training content, provides feedback and analytics to give you better visibility, and enables learning sequences, videos, print-to-PDF, and more.
Great knowledge you have shared
It is more of a niche, but there are also self-hosted personal wikis that need no server and work on a personal computer. For Windows a viable alternative is MyInfo:
It allows rich text formatting in pages, automatically updates link titles and allows export to a web site.
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I’m looking forward to reading more about wiki software in the future!