I know wikis have been discussed here before, but I wanted to add my two cents after shopping around for a wiki at work and for personal use.
Obsidian
Pros
- plain text storage format
- great at gathering disorganized thoughts without imposing a rigid structure
Cons
- closed source
- many features that arguably define a wiki are either absent or paywalled, like easy sharing, collaboration, and versioning
Mediawiki
Pros
- it’s the wiki. Everyone’s used and possibly edited a Wikipedia page.
- version history
- close to Obsidian in terms of “write now, organize later”
- Probably the nicest-looking FOSS wiki platform out of the box
- a lot of the features that Obsidian paywalls are built in, like multi user support and version history
Cons
- Articles not stored in plain text
- Has its own markup. Granted Mediawiki predates Markdown but the table syntax is horrendous. The Mediawiki help page on the matter actually tries to dissuade you from using tables and notes that the markup is ugly.
- Extensions are annoying to install
- Absolutely zero access control. You can even edit other people’s user pages. There’s no way to hide sections of a wiki from the public or from particular groups of users.
- It tries to be all things to everyone. While this makes it versatile, it also means doing a particular thing probably requires knowledge of CSS or Mediawiki’s own templeting syntax. Sometimes I just want to have an info box that doesn’t clutter the source code of a page.
Dokuwiki
Pros
- Access control finally!
- Plain text files
- Easy to create namespaces, which Mediawiki also has but doesn’t want you to go crazy making your own.
- While it’s not Markdown, the markup is nicer than Mediawiki IMO. The table syntax at least is miles better
Cons
- Uglier than sin. Yes even many of the templates (themes) on offer aren’t much better. The Bootstrap 3 template seems particularly popular, and while it’s a marked improvement in most areas, like a lot of frontends that use those bootswatch pallets there are dusty corners that don’t work, like black text on a black background.
- Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can’t even rename a page?
- Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable).
Bookstack
Pros
- It looks good I guess. Haven’t spent much time with it.
- Yay markdown!
- Also has access control
Cons
- Also not plain text
- remember earlier when I talked about “write now, organize later”? Bookstack holds a gun to your head and forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. I know some people thrive under this limitation, but I don’t.
Other wikis I’ve tried but not to the same extent
Wiki.js
IDK, I don’t know much about this one, but don’t like the workflow of making new pages.
Gollum
Really simple, which is both good and bad.
An Otter Wiki (the article seems to be part of the name)
A lot like Gollum. Doesn’t indicate when you link to a nonexistent page. No support for article tags.
Pepperminty wiki
Looks cool but it’s abandoned
Tiddlywiki
Steep learning curve but pretty versatile. It’s a single HTML file so you can host it on something like Neocities. Really rudimentary search functions
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I used to put all my setup & config notes into tiddlywiki, and to some point I still update them, but it’s become difficult for others to update and maintain when I share them as you need a browser addin to be able to save updates properly.
The formatting is similar to markdown, but just a little different to make copying the original source that way too… but… I’d still consider it, esp. once you’ve really played with it and found all the things it’s capable of.
For work, we use Bookstack, you can use the api to export pages as markdown as a quasi-backup. At home, I have been using Jotty. It saves as markdown, organizes with folders, and has a decent mobile interface for when you’re on the go. I just use syncthing to sync the data directory (markdown files in folders) to my backup storage
Have you tried
Outline?
I recently set it up and I’m very impressed.
DokuWiki
The table syntax at least is miles better [than MediaWiki]
For simple tables or for calculation tables, yes. It’s relatively close to Markdown, even.
Unfortunately it does not play nicely with any sort of advanced syntax on table cells themselves, such as lists inside tables. For that, I prefer the MediaWiki syntax even if it’s ugly (a DW plugin called exttab3 provides near 1:1 MW table syntax).
Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can’t even rename a page?
IMO it’s one of its strengths, and you can do most stuff with plugins. You can even render your pages as web slides with one plugin, and in fact I used to use DW as my “PowerPoint” for quickie presentations for over a decade.
All that said, there are DW “bundles” that incorporate some good and cool things together from the get-go. Anything that incorporates the Include, Indexmenu and Wrap plugins should be golden for getting started.
As for moving, I’ve asked around for a couple of years (more like 8) and seen how things have changed (or not), and it turns out it’s half a consequence of documents being plain text files (there had to be some sort of disadvantage to that!). While it might (actually, is) possible to just move a file, there is no cheap, simple and fast way to also update all links that point to that page across the wiki, as those might be not normal links or even be dynamically generated by plugins. So most implementers are at the philosophical stage of “what even is a ‘move’?” ATM.
I hear there are improvements with some plugins that advance some of the work, but I haven’t tested myself. Don’t need to, since I just use the Page Redirect plugin if I want to mark stuff as “moved”.
Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable)
Mutilates file names and mutilates article titles, separately.
The former is one of the PITAs in the design I feel. There are good, stable patches that allow uppercase filenames in the filesystem (as well as Unicode and even emojis) bu no core config option to enable them. The closest option is “safe filename encode” I think, which allows most accented letters, diacritics and stuff, but no punctuation signs, and still replaces into underscores.
I get the why (it’s very useful for making sure article and section IDs are unique) but, like, still. It’s 2026, I can name my second video card like the poop emoji and my system won’t complain.
The latter is a configurable option actually. Just set the “use heading” preference to “always” and articles will always be titled the way the first heading available does it (so, technically, the same behaviour as MediaWiki).
Disclaimer
I’ve used MediaWiki for 6 years and DokuWiki for [*checks notes*] about 18.
Here are a few more:
logseq
Its an outliner, a colleague of mine basically lives in that thing.
silverbullet
It’s almost perfect for me but the browser based editing made it unusable because there is no way to unmap Ctrl + W in a browser and I can’t live without my Vim bindings.
QOwnNotes
This is the solution for normal people who don’t spend n+1 hours tweaking their editor configuration.
Org-Roam
For people who do spend n+1 hours tweaking their emacs configuration.
logseq
Forgot about logseq. It’s an outliner first and foremost, so not what I’m looking for.
silverbullet
This one’s almost there. No version history. For accessibility reasons I’d like something that clearly separates the acts of writing/editing and reading/consuming. It works better with screen readers. In silverbullet, headings only look like headings, but they’re just undifferentiated text to a screen reader. Obsidian has the same problem). I get why people want a seamless editing experience, but it’s very important to me to keep track of how my ideas change over time, and Obsidian and Silverbullet are constantly saving your edits, making versioning difficult.
Helix notes (mentioned recently in another post) tries to get past this by having a “save new version” button.
QOwnNotes
Very very simple. I can see why some would be attracted to it but I’m not.
+1 for logseq… it literally saved my life when I changed jobs, nothing else came close.
However, the original markdown version has really slowed down development whilst the newer db version is slowly catching up, so, I’d rcommend the MD version for now, but people might want to hold for a little while…
I’ve used mediawiki and I hated maintaining it. Absolutely do not recommend other than as a last resort.
I split my wiki-hopes and wishes into memos: https://github.com/usememos/memos
And hedgedoc: https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc
tiddlywiki has one of the most insane search engines from this list. They have a whole filters syntax that can express pretty much anything imaginable, no? I went back to TW from Obsidian because I was tired from Obsidian’s trivial search functionality.
