Confluence vs BookStack
BookStack is a free, self-hosted wiki you run yourself; Confluence is Atlassian's hosted workspace with a free plan limited to 10 users.
Pick Confluence if…
Pick Confluence if your team already uses Jira or other Atlassian tools and you want a hosted service with permissions, integrations and support tiers. The free plan covers up to 10 users.
Pick BookStack if…
Pick BookStack if you can run a PHP and MySQL server and want a simple, MIT-licensed wiki with no per-user fees. It suits teams that want full control of where their documentation lives.
Price
- Freemium
- Free
- Open source
Starting price
Free plan
Open source
Works on
| Feature | Atlassian's workspace for team documentation and knowledge, with a free plan for up to 10 users. | Free, self-hosted wiki software that organizes content into books, chapters and pages. |
|---|---|---|
| Price |
|
|
| Starting price | US$5.78 per user per month (Standard) | — |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Works on | Web, iOS, Android | Web |
| Try Confluence (opens the Confluence website in a new tab) | Try BookStack (opens the BookStack website in a new tab) |
Confluence's pricing page lists Free ('free forever for 10 users', up to 2 GB file storage), Standard, Premium and Enterprise. Its pricing data gives US$5.78 per user per month for Standard and US$11.16 per user per month for Premium; Enterprise goes through sales.
Paid Confluence plans add things such as advanced permissions, free guest access, more storage (250 GB on Standard, unlimited on Premium) and uptime SLAs of 99.9% and 99.95% on Premium and Enterprise. Its site lists integrations with Jira, Figma, GitHub, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams and Loom.
BookStack is free and MIT-licensed. Content is organized into books, chapters and pages, with a WYSIWYG editor, an optional Markdown editor, diagrams.net, search, revisions, roles and permissions, and sign-in through OIDC, SAML2 or LDAP.
The trade-off is hosting. BookStack needs your own server with PHP 8.2 or later and MySQL 8.0 or later (or MariaDB 10.6 or later), and its site does not mention official paid hosting. It does offer Support Plans, but their prices are not stated.
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Last updated 16 October 2026. How we make money