BookStack
A simple, structured wiki for your team's knowledge — books, chapters, pages, full-text search.
BookStack
BookStack is an open-source documentation platform with a clean three-tier structure: Books contain Chapters, Chapters contain Pages. It has a WYSIWYG editor (or Markdown if you prefer), full-text search, page diffs and revisions, granular per-shelf/book/chapter/page permissions, and SSO via SAML, OIDC or LDAP.
Internal documentation is the institutional memory of a company. Confluence and Notion keep it in a black-box cloud you cannot inspect, on terms that change yearly. BookStack is the boring, sensible alternative: predictable structure, predictable cost, exportable in HTML, PDF, Markdown and plain text — so your knowledge stays portable even if you change everything else around it.
Capabilities
Shelves → Books → Chapters → Pages
A clear, hierarchical structure that scales from a five-page handbook to a multi-department knowledge base without turning into a graph of broken links.
WYSIWYG and Markdown editors
Non-technical teammates use the WYSIWYG editor; engineers can flip the same page to Markdown mode. Both produce the same clean HTML.
Full-text search and revisions
Search across every book, chapter and page in milliseconds. Every edit creates a revision with diffs and one-click rollback.
Granular permissions and SSO
Per-shelf, per-book, per-chapter and per-page roles. SAML, OIDC and LDAP let your existing IdP control who sees what.
Why this beats the proprietary default
The same advantages apply across every product on this page — open source is a category-level upgrade, not a niche preference.
Auditable source code
Anyone can read, review and audit the code. Security researchers, your own engineers, or an independent auditor — no black boxes, no "trust us".
Your data, your infrastructure
Runs on hardware you control, in a jurisdiction you choose. No silent data exports to a US hyperscaler, no "product improvement" sampling of your content.
Predictable cost, no per-seat tax
Pay for hosting and operations, not for every user, mailbox or feature flag. Adding the tenth or hundredth user doesn't multiply your bill.
Exit is built in
Open standards, open formats, no vendor lock-in. If you ever want to move — to another host, another team, in-house — the data and the software are yours to take.
Want to run BookStack on your terms?
We host, monitor, patch and back up the whole stack on European infrastructure — so you get the open-source upside without the operations cost.