An OpenSource solution for internal documentation, that You can open to more contributors
We use BookStack to organize the knowledge base of our IT department in a logical, human understandable manner. User authenticates with …
Overview
What is BookStack?
BookStack is a self-hosted platform designed to help businesses organize and store information. According to the vendor, it is suitable for companies of all sizes, including small startups and large enterprises. Professionals and industries such as software development, IT and technology, education,...
Recent Reviews
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
2 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is SharePoint?
Microsoft's SharePoint is an Intranet solution that enables users to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and collaborate across the organization.
What is Notion?
Notion aims to present users with an all-in-one workspace — for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, from Notion Labs in San Francisco.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
What is BookStack?
BookStack is a self-hosted platform designed to help businesses organize and store information. According to the vendor, it is suitable for companies of all sizes, including small startups and large enterprises. Professionals and industries such as software development, IT and technology, education, marketing and advertising, and non-profit organizations can benefit from the features offered by BookStack.
Key Features
Simple Interface: BookStack offers a user-friendly interface with a WYSIWYG page editor. The content is organized into three groups: Books, Chapters, and Pages. The vendor claims that the interface is designed for simplicity and ease of use.
Searchable and Connected: According to the vendor, all content in BookStack is fully searchable, allowing users to search at the book level or across all books, chapters, and pages. The ability to link directly to any paragraph enables easy navigation and connected documentation.
Configurable: BookStack provides configuration options that allow users to customize the platform according to their needs. The vendor states that users can change the name, logo, and registration options. Additionally, the visibility of the entire system can be configured to be publicly viewable or restricted.
Simple Requirements: BookStack is built using PHP and the Laravel framework. The vendor claims that it is designed to run smoothly on a $5 Digital Ocean VPS. The platform utilizes MySQL to store data, ensuring accessible requirements.
Built-In diagrams.net: BookStack's page editor includes a built-in diagrams.net drawing capability, which the vendor says enables users to create diagrams within their documentation quickly and easily.
Multi-Lingual: According to the vendor, BookStack supports multiple languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and more. Users can set their preferred language for the platform.
Optional Markdown Editor: BookStack supports writing in Markdown and provides a markdown editor with a live-preview feature. According to the vendor, this feature gives users flexibility in their documentation creation.
Integrated Authentication: BookStack supports integrated authentication with various social providers such as GitHub, Google, Slack, and AzureAD. The vendor states that enterprise environments can utilize Okta, SAML2, and LDAP options for authentication.
Powerful Features: BookStack offers powerful features such as cross-book sorting, page revisions, and image management. The vendor claims that a full role and permission system allows for content and action control, enabling users to lock down content and actions as required.
Multi-Factor Authentication: BookStack has built-in multi-factor authentication (MFA), which the vendor states can enhance security. According to the vendor, MFA can be enforced at a per-role level, and users can utilize options such as TOTP (Google/Microsoft Authenticator, Authy) and static backup codes.
BookStack Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Web-Based, Windows, Linux |
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(1)Reviews
(1-1 of 1)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 22, 2024
An OpenSource solution for internal documentation, that You can open to more contributors
We use BookStack to organize the knowledge base of our IT department in a logical, human understandable manner. User authenticates with their Active Directory account. Some books are open to everyone in the company, such as end-user manuals for most our internal information systems, FAQs and an official update journal of the IT department. Other books are available upon login, with granular access-management based on AD group memberships. My colleagues in IT organize support manuals, I publish methodologies, application infrastracture documentation and handbooks for external suppliers so that we reduce their prep time as well as time required from internal resources to instruct them. Once, we have run user acceptability tests in BookStack, detailing the steps in the software itself and embedding an assessment matrix form (from another service) in a floating overlay.
- Documentation
- Guides
- Knowledge-base
- Version control
- Continuity in backward compatibility
- Dark mode
- Absent tree view
- Spillover within Business IT staff up, nearly double substitutability. This is through the ability of a support technician servicing a different product to find a guide describing how to solve the more frequent issues the way a product lead would do it.
- Time to draft and publish a documentation down some 20% compared to previous solution.
- OpenSource that integrates fine with enterprise-grade software and somehow even passes security audit. 20 times cheaper to implement compared to Confluence, almost free to maintain.
- Atlassian Confluence, MediaWiki, DokuWiki and OneNote
Confluence, having only a slight advantage in terms of features compared to BookStack, really only makes sense to procure as a part of the Jira bundle. It requires much more maintenance from my experience and does not really deliver any extra value aside from the very strict certifications like HIPAA.
DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP.
As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.
DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP.
As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.