Top self-hosted wiki software for teams

BookStack suits teams who want a wiki that explains itself. Pages live in books, books can be split into chapters, and books sit on shelves. That fixed shape is easy to describe to a new hire and hard to turn into a maze. The default editor is visual, so people who’ve never seen Markdown can write; if you prefer Markdown, an editor with live preview is built in, and so is a diagrams.net drawing tool. Revisions are kept, so a bad edit is undone in a click.

Where it stands out against the others here is access control. You get roles, overrides down to a single page, OIDC, SAML2, LDAP and two-factor login that an admin can require for a role, and none of it sits behind a paid plan. The cost of the rigid structure is a depth limit: documentation that needs more than four levels won’t fit. The cost of the simple editor is that there is no live co-editing, so a second person saving the same page can silently replace the first person’s changes.

To run it you need PHP 8.2 or newer and MySQL 8 or MariaDB; Docker works through community-maintained images rather than an official one, and shared hosting isn’t supported. For a long-lived wiki it helps that content comes out through a REST API and per-book exports, and the license means no vendor can change the terms on you.

XWiki is the odd one in this group because it is as much an application platform as a wiki. Pages can hold structured data, and its App Within Minutes tool lets a team build small data-driven apps inside the wiki. Over 700 extensions cover importers (including one for Confluence), diagrams and sign-in. It is one of the older wiki engines, the project reports thousands of active installs, and the free edition has no user cap; the company sells support.

You pay for that power in setup and polish. It runs on a Java servlet container such as Tomcat with a database behind it, with Docker, a Debian package and a war file available for installation. Customization is where long-lived installs get hurt: the more you bend it, the harder an upgrade becomes, so keep your changes few.

It ranks level with BookStack in the table but fits a different team. Pick BookStack for its fixed, easy-to-explain structure; pick XWiki if your content is large or structured enough that BookStack’s four levels and fixed shape would box you in.

On paper Wiki.js has the most complete feature list here: Git sync that mirrors your pages into a repository you already know how to back up, directory and single sign-on, SCIM account provisioning, an audit log, and an API documented to the OpenAPI standard. Version 3 also adds live editing where several people write one page at once.

The catch is timing. Wiki.js 3 is a complete rewrite whose first stable release is brand new. There is no in-place upgrade from version 2: you export a package, import it into a fresh version 3 install and redo authentication, storage and comment settings by hand. Version 2 is still maintained, but it is the older codebase; the version 3 features described above do not all apply to it. Docker users should pin the major version tag instead of latest.

That is why it sits third despite the strongest feature list. Version 2 is the proven path, with an upgrade project ahead if you later move to version 3. Test your own content in version 3 before relying on it for the whole team.

DokuWiki stores every page as a text file in a folder, which gives it two virtues: backup is copying a folder, and leaving DokuWiki means taking the folder. It needs only PHP and a web server, so it runs on hardware that would choke on the Node and Postgres stacks, and it keeps every older version of a page so you can compare it with the current one.

The price is the editing experience. Writers use a toolbar over a text area with DokuWiki’s own markup, and a visual editor is a plugin, not part of the core. Its current release adds optional Markdown syntax, which should ease the learning curve for people who already know Markdown. When two people edit one page, a lock keeps the second out rather than merging live. The look is dated, and LDAP and SAML authentication use plugins. There is a built-in access control list for each namespace and page, and no built-in backup tool beyond that folder copy. The community-maintained LinuxServer.io image covers Docker.

It is the right choice for a home lab, a small technical team or anyone who values plain files over polish. It is a poor choice for a team that will judge the wiki on how nice writing in it feels.

If you’ve used Notion and want that feel on your own server, Outline is the closest of these. The editor handles Markdown, slash commands and embeds, several people can edit a page at once, and comments and version history are included in the free Community edition.

The costs are around the editor. There is no username-and-password login: people sign in through Google, Microsoft Entra, Slack, Discord or an OIDC provider, and the project’s sample configuration says at least one such provider must be set up before anyone can log in. Production needs PostgreSQL and Redis, and the project itself says it expects dev-ops experience. The Community edition omits SAML, guest users, additional sign-in restrictions, the audit log and the Confluence importer; the Business plan adds them at $4 per user per month billed annually with a minimum of 10 users (as of November 2026).

The license deserves a plain reading. It is the Business Source License, which isn’t open source, but for running Outline for your own staff it allows what you’d expect; it forbids only offering a commercial document service to outside parties, and it converts to Apache 2.0 in 2030. For a team that wants the best editor and already has an identity provider, that is a reasonable bargain. For a team that wants the lowest long-term risk and the simplest install, BookStack is easier to keep running.

MediaWiki has the longest record here: it was written in 2002 for Wikipedia, and companies such as Intel and Novell have used it internally. If you want a wiki that will outlast any trend, and your content is closer to an encyclopedia than a handbook, it deserves a look. Categories, templates and namespaces organize big collections, and the extension library is enormous.

As a team wiki it asks more than it gives. Editing is in wikitext by default, which has been described as challenging to learn; the visual editor is an add-on that can need extra setup. A private wiki takes one line of configuration, but rights are given to groups, there are no page-level restrictions in core, and files you upload stay publicly reachable until you set up the file-serving rules. A security flaw on older versions let any user read all pages of a private wiki, so a private install needs to stay current. Default search is basic until you add Elasticsearch.

Choose it when readers outnumber writers and you plan to build something large. For a team handbook, nearly everything else here is easier.

Docmost is the newest project here, built as an open-source alternative to Confluence. It covers the editing basics well: live editing without overwrites, comments, page history, diagrams and a page tree grouped into spaces. It signs people in with an email and password, so unlike Outline it needs no external identity provider, and it runs as three containers (the app, PostgreSQL and Redis) with an outbound mail setup for invites and password resets.

The line between free and paid is the thing to read carefully. The free edition lacks single sign-on (SAML and OIDC), LDAP, two-factor login, page-level permissions, the REST API and the Confluence importer; those belong to the Business and Enterprise licenses, whose code lives under a separate license in the same repository. Check that your must-haves aren’t on the paid side before you start. The other caution is age: the project is young, with a smaller community and documentation that is thinner on advanced configuration. We’d watch it for a year before putting years of company pages in it.