An OpenSource solution for internal documentation, that You can open to more contributors
February 22, 2024
An OpenSource solution for internal documentation, that You can open to more contributors
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BookStack
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.
Do you think BookStack delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with BookStack's feature set?
Yes
Did BookStack live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of BookStack go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy BookStack again?
Yes