BookStack

What BookStack does

BookStack is a wiki for documentation that borrows its structure from a library. Pages are grouped into optional chapters, chapters and pages live in books, and books can be placed on shelves, with one book allowed on several shelves. The fixed hierarchy is the point: it gives non-technical colleagues an obvious place to put things, and the project’s stated aim is that anyone with basic word-processing skills can contribute.

Pages are written in a WYSIWYG editor or, if you prefer, a Markdown editor with live preview. Drawings and diagrams come from a built-in diagrams.net integration; each drawing is saved as a PNG with the diagram data embedded, so it can be edited again later. Search covers all content or a single book, supports filters, and any paragraph can be linked directly. Page revisions, templates, tags and reusable page content round out the editing features.

Access control and sign-in

Permissions are one of BookStack’s strengths. Roles carry system-wide permissions and default rights on content, and those defaults can be overridden on any shelf, book, chapter or page for specific roles. Overrides on books and chapters cascade to the content inside them.

Single sign-on is included in the free software rather than a paid tier: OIDC, SAML 2.0 and LDAP are supported alongside email and password login and social providers. Multi-factor authentication with TOTP apps and backup codes is built in and can be enforced per role. An instance can also be made publicly readable, which suits public documentation.

Self-hosting BookStack

BookStack is a PHP application on the Laravel framework. It needs PHP 8.2 or later with a list of common extensions, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or later, Composer, Git and a web server such as Apache or Nginx. The official routes are a manual install from the release branch and install scripts for fresh Ubuntu LTS servers, which set up Apache, MySQL and PHP for you. Docker images exist but are maintained by the community, and shared PHP hosting is not supported. Uploads can stay on local disk or go to S3-compatible storage.

The project moved its development, issue tracker and releases to Codeberg in April 2026. The GitHub repository remains as a mirror that still receives commits and releases, so the GitHub figures on this page are current, but discussion and issues now happen on Codeberg.

Hosted version

There is no official hosted service, and the project FAQ says there are no plans for one. Third-party hosts offer BookStack, but the project does not vet or endorse them. Official paid support plans are sold through HTTP Functions Ltd.

Limitations

The book-chapter-page structure is fixed, with no deeper nesting and no Notion-style databases. The documentation does not describe real-time co-editing; pages are edited with drafts and revisions. BookStack is web only, with no desktop or offline apps. The project deliberately keeps a narrow scope and does not offer a plugin system, so features outside documentation are unlikely to be added.

Who it suits

BookStack suits organizations that want an internal documentation site that staff can use without training, with SSO and MFA included and a conventional PHP and MySQL stack that is cheap to run. Teams that want live co-editing should compare Docmost; those who want pages stored in Git, Wiki.js. See also our alternatives to Confluence.