BookStack

BookStack is a free, open-source, self-hosted wiki and documentation platform designed to provide a simple, elegant, and user-friendly alternative to complex enterprise documentation tools. Created by Dan Brown in 2016 and written in PHP using the Laravel framework, BookStack organizes content into a structured hierarchy of Books, Chapters, and Pages, making it intuitive for teams to create, organize, and share documentation without learning markdown or complex syntax. The platform features a built-in WYSIWYG editor for rich text content creation alongside markdown support, with drag-and-drop image uploads, code blocks with syntax highlighting, and customizable page templates. Key features include role-based permission management with granular control at the book, chapter, and page level, multi-factor authentication (MFA), LDAP, SAML 2.0, and OIDC authentication integration, full-text search across all content, revision history with visual diff comparison and rollback capabilities, drawing integration with Draw.io and Excalidraw, dark mode, and a REST API for programmatic access. BookStack supports 30+ language translations and provides a theme system for custom branding and visual customization. The platform is used by thousands of organizations worldwide for internal documentation, knowledge bases, standard operating procedures, project wikis, and educational content. With over 15,000 GitHub stars, BookStack is available under the MIT License and can be deployed on any PHP-capable server with MySQL or MariaDB.