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Comparison of wiki software

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The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date.

Comparison table

Basic general information about the distributions: creator/company, license/price etc.

General coWiki DokuWiki Instiki MediaWiki MoinMoin Perspective PhpWiki PmWiki TWiki WackoWiki WikkaWiki XWiki
Latest stable release 0.3.4 2005-07-13 0.10.2 1.4.7 1.3.4 0.842 1.2.10 1.0.14 20040902 R4.2 1.1.6.0 0.9.840
Stable release date February 24, 2005 July 13, 2005 May 1, 2005 July 16, 2005 March 13, 2005 June 22, 2005 July 24, 2005 September 2, 2004 March 27, 2005 January 24, 2005 July 2nd, 2005
First public release date March, 2002 July 4, 2004 ? January 25, 2002 July 28, 2000 March, 2004 December, 1999 August 26, 2004 October, 1998 March, 2003 May 16, 2004 February, 2004
Target audience Corporate; Public; Private Public; Private; Corporate Public; Private Corporate; Public; Private Corporate; Public; Private Corporation; Intranet Public; Private Public; Private Corporate Corporation; Education; Public; Private Corporation; Education; Public; Private Corporation; Education; Public; Private


Programming Language PHP PHP Ruby PHP Python ASPNET PHP PHP Perl PHP PHP Java


Features coWiki DokuWiki Instiki MediaWiki MoinMoin Perspective PhpWiki PmWiki TWiki WackoWiki WikkaWiki XWiki
File uploading / attachments no yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
SPAM prevention no blacklist no CPAN Blog::SpamAssassin blocking words, IP addresses (addon), limiting the quantity of non-approved URLs (option), by encrypting the email address (addon) Refferer blacklist Refferer blacklist (module), HTTP REQUEST analising (module)
Page access controlTemplate:Fn yes, due to UNIX-style permissions yes, optional no no yes yes (per collection) yes yes yes yes yes yes
Inline HTMLTemplate:Fn no optional yes safe no normalised to XML plugin module yes yes/safe/no yes/safe/no yes
User-customizable interfaceTemplate:Fn hand-edited templates, document "Print version" CSS, PHP; heavily documented PHP API CSS many features are user-customizable, templatesTemplate:Fn CSS, XSLT, user editable navigation if hardcoded into skin themes; un-documented themes, user CSS, ... templates, skins themes, style-sheets style-sheets style-sheets, templates, themes
Document renaming yes, all pages are seamlessly updated no no yes, old page becomes a redirect yes, old page becomes a redirect yes yes module yes yes no no
Extensibility plugins via an OOP interface custom regexps fairly trivial with minimal Ruby knowledge actions, handlers different plugin types actions plugins modules plugins, addons actions, handlers actions, handlers plugins, macros, scripts, applications
Other Notable features Data saved hierarchic (web trees) and in XML, per-page threaded comments, comfortable installation wizard Section Editing, XHTML-Compliant, nice tables, side-by-side diff, namespaces, Interwiki Trivial to setup on any platform that supports Ruby. Can use different (administrator-set) markup languages. Supports inline HTML, Textile, Markdown, and RDoc. Per-article discussion page, watchlist email notification, additional desktop edition WYSIWYG editing, searching over MS Office documents support all databases ? Revision control, email notification, forms multilingual, WYSIWYG-like editor, ACLs, subpages, comments, files, email notification, cloning of pages, installation wizard... FreeMind support, ACLs cloning of pages, syntax highlighting... Forms and Scripting, Multilingual, Database storage, Fulltext search, GraphViz, SVG, Freemind, WYSIWYG Editing
Installation coWiki DokuWiki Instiki MediaWiki MoinMoin Perspective PhpWiki PmWiki TWiki WackoWiki WikkaWiki XWiki
Runs on Windows yes yes yes yes yes yes, with Apache+PHP5 yes yes yes yes
Ease of installation Moderately simple Trivial Difficult Easy for Desktop version Moderately simple Moderately simple Very Easy Moderately difficult Quick and easy, multilingual installer Easy installation, through web-wizard Simple package for Windows Available
Web-server required Should work on any web server with PHP None (built-in) Apache or IIS with PHP None for Desktop version IIS Any Web-server with PHP Any Web-server with PHP Apache v1.3.x (not v2) Apache v1.3.x (v2 recommended), IIS Any Web-server with PHP Tomcat or Jetty
Other software required MySQL, PHP PHP Ruby MySQL, PHP Python .NET Runtime 1.1 PHP PHP Cygwin MySQL, PHP MySQL/PHP MySQL or HSQLDB
Miscellaneous coWiki DokuWiki Instiki MediaWiki MoinMoin Perspective PhpWiki PmWiki TWiki WackoWiki WikkaWiki XWiki
Creator (and Maintainer) Daniel T. Gorski; Paul Hanchett Andreas Gohr David Heinemeier Hansson Magnus Manske; Brion Vibber Jürgen Hermann; Thomas Waldmann; ... Alan Slater Steve Wainstead, ... Patrick Michaud Peter Thoeny Roman Ivanov Jason Tourtelotte Ludovic Dubost
Predecessor n/a n/a n/a n/a PikiPiki n/a WikiWikiWeb n/a JosWiki WakkaWiki WakkaWiki n/a
Cost (USD) Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free
Software license GPL GPL Ruby LicenseTemplate:Fn GPL GPL GPL GPL GPL GPL BSD GPL GPL/LGPL
Template:Fnb Instiki - Ruby License
RubyForge lists Instiki as having a license type of "Ruby License". The author provided no information on their homepage, and no information has been yet found on what this license type means. Yukihiro Matsumoto's Ruby license was found.
Template:Fnb Page Access Control
Some wiki engines allow (optional) read/write access restriction to users or user groups on a per-page basis (for instance, through Access control lists).
Template:Fnb Inline HTML
Safe means that not all HTML is allowed. That is better than Full, for security reasons. Users with complete access to HTML could, for example, spoof forms to trick users.
Template:Fnb User-customizable interface
  • Many items have administrator hand-editable templates.
  • Even items which use hard-coded templates could still be modified if the source is available.
Template:Fnb MediaWiki Customizable interface - templates
The default skin (MonoBook) is not compatible with PHP5 and so MediaWiki will fall back to another template which, for example, does not have shortcuts.
(Actually I've been using MediaWiki 1.4.4 with PHP5 and the default skin (MonoBook), and it seems to work alright so far, at least. I've just started, so we'll see...)

Advice on choosing a Wiki

Choosing a suitable wiki for your needs can be difficult due to the bewildering number of choices. For some people, choosing a Wiki engine that uses text files for storage instead of a database might be easiest, since it does not require a database server (like MySQL).

If you are interested in a proof-of-concept, you might want to start with DidiWiki or Instiki .

DidiWiki is a tiny wiki implementation with built in web server.

Instiki requires no web-server and is easy to install on any platform (including Linux, MacOSX and Windows) that supports Ruby.

Other comparison tables

Other sites

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