Comparison of wiki software

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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

1 Comparison table
2 Advice on choosing a Wiki
3 External links
- 3.1 Other comparison tables
- 3.2 Other sites

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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	2005-09-22	0.10.2	1.5.0	1.3.5	0.842	1.2.10	2.0.10	20040902	R4.2	1.1.6.0	0.9.840
Stable release date	February 24, 2005	September 22, 2005	May 1, 2005	October 5, 2005	August 4, 2005	June 22, 2005	July 24, 2005	September 29, 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			BadContent filtering via Regular Expressions		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 control^f1	yes, due to UNIX-style permissions	yes, optional	no	no	yes	yes (per collection)	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Inline HTML^f2	no	optional	yes	safe	no	normalised to XML	plugin	module	yes	yes/safe/no	yes/safe/no	yes
User-customizable interface^f3	hand-edited templates, document "Print version"	CSS, PHP; heavily documented PHP API	CSS	many features are user-customizable, templates^mw2	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 can be 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 set up 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 Licenseⁱⁿ¹	GPL	GPL	GPL	GPL	GPL	GPL	BSD	GPL	GPL/LGPL

Note in1

Instiki - Ruby License

Instiki is distributed under the same terms as Ruby itself, per the Ruby license.

Note f1

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).

Note f2

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.

Note f3

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.

Note mw2: 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...)

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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.

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