Good internal wiki software

Question

I am looking to deploy an internal wiki at work and im looking for a wiki that has a easy to use interface and WYSIWYG editor (For the people who cant find the start menu in vista :) )

Both free and paid are welcome

Do you have any more specific requirements? – Zoredache May 21 '09 at 06:33 — Zoredache, May 21 '09 at 06:33

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 21 '10 at 15:42

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MindTouch (previously known as Dekiwiki) is pretty nice. We use it for our Intranet and our users seem to love it.

edited Oct 21 '10 at 15:42

crb

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answered May 21 '09 at 06:32

Zoredache

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I strongly recommend Mindtouch Dekiwiki. Neat extensibility features, as well. – pc1oad1etter May 21 '09 at 13:40
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I as well strongly recommend Mindtouch. We have been using it for almost 2 years, and have had great success. – Jeff Miles May 21 '09 at 18:01

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered May 21 '09 at 07:23

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Have a look at WikiMatrix, where you can compare them all by answering a few questions.

answered May 21 '09 at 07:23

stukelly

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John · Answer 3 · 2009-05-21T11:49:30.190

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We use the open source Screw Turn wiki. It is just about to have a new release (version 3) which will support both WISIWIG editing and markup.

It runs in on a windows platform under ASP.net in IIS.

edited May 21 '09 at 11:49

answered May 21 '09 at 07:32

John

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We use ScrewTurn in our company. Great software for Windows Servers +1 – splattne May 21 '09 at 08:50
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It needs a better name to be taken seriously. I use it to provide tech notes to other developers as well as support notes for my project's help desk. I've heard that Share Point doesn't do well as a public-facing system. ScrewTurn works well in this area. – Brad Bruce May 21 '09 at 10:50
ScrewTurn is awesome. (ASP based) +1 – squillman May 21 '09 at 14:42
Er, ASP.NET to be correct... – squillman May 21 '09 at 14:49

Jarod Elliott · Answer 4 · 2009-05-21T06:46:00.390

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We successfully use Mediawiki internally and there's a way of replacing the normal editor with FCKEditor for WYSIWYG editing at http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net.

Not to mention a range of other extensions which may be useful.

edited May 21 '09 at 06:46

answered May 21 '09 at 06:38

Jarod Elliott

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The obvious benefit here is that, if you are deploying to a tech-savvy crowd with possible Wikipedia experience, they will face nearly no learning curve in transitioning to an internal MediaWiki installation. – Wesley May 21 '09 at 08:32
Agreed. Very simple setup, very popular - so there's a ton of resources around if you do get stuck, or need additional features. – Kara Marfia May 21 '09 at 11:58
Mediawiki is also awesome. I give you Wikipedia... – squillman May 21 '09 at 14:43
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I've got to be honest, I can't stand Mediawiki outside of Wikipedia. It has too many design decisions that were made very much with Wikipedia/Encyclopedia in mind, making it a pain to deal with for general purpose use. I've been at two companies where someone started with a Mediawiki install and then replaced it with something else within six months. Both times, everyone was much happier with the replacement. – Christopher Cashell Jun 10 '09 at 16:29

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered May 21 '09 at 07:01

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We have been using Atlassian's Confluence, for about two years now. It has been great, they have other tools that integrate with it. It does cost money, but it isn't that much and they even have a hosted option so that you don't need to deal with administration. Confluence also has a built in WYSIWYG editor and has import/export to Word documents and export to PDFs.

One of the big benefits is that there is a right 3rd party ecosystem for it and many new plugins and features are available.

answered May 21 '09 at 07:01

GreenKiwi

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On the flip side, it's got kind of weird/awkward markup and a lot of quirks. The ease of adding plugins is a two-edged sword: handy, but it can make upgrades painful. And if you don't have a controlled userbase, plugins can be a security concern. Atlassian Jira is a decent issue tracker, but unless you have a specific need, I personally wouldn't recommend Confluence. – mattdm Dec 08 '10 at 19:21

score 4 · Answer 6 · answered May 21 '09 at 07:45

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Windows SharePoint Services has a wiki feature with an easy to use interface and a WYSIWYG editor. It's provided as a free download for Windows Server.

answered May 21 '09 at 07:45

Dale Nicholls

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We use the SharePoint Wiki as well. Assuming you can spare the server and the configuration time, it is good enough for internal use, and has good connectivity to the rest of SharePoint services, and good search built in. Too bad it supports best only IE. – Moshe May 21 '09 at 07:58
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We use SharePoint extensively, but personally I hate the SharePoint wiki technology. I'm hopeful that the next release of SharePoint will improve it.... – cori May 21 '09 at 09:35
At work, some of the upper management is pushing strongly to abandon our internal Wiki in favor of SharePoint. I have to be honest, I've come to seriously dislike SharePoint. The SharePoint wiki is an absolute joke compared to a real Wiki Engine, and sharepoint is a huge pain in the ass to work with. – Christopher Cashell Jun 10 '09 at 16:36

score 4 · Answer 7 · answered May 21 '09 at 13:08

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I used Dokuwiki after doing some research using the wiki comparison site: wikimatrix.org.

What I liked about Dokuwiki is that it did not require a database and was easy to setup, administer and extend through PHP plugins. I have found that the plugins are very powerful and that it was pretty straightforward to create new ones (I am not a PHP expert at all) - se my blog post on this: blog.monnet-usa.com/?p=33

I am running Dokiwiki on IIS and used a AD integration plugin to allow Windows Authentication for my users.

answered May 21 '09 at 13:08

Philippe Monnet

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We use Dokuwiki internally and as a backend for a couple low priority sites. We've been middlingly happy with it. It's not a particularly outstanding system once you delve deep into the internals, but it works just fine for the simple use cases. One of the features that drew us to it initially was the user access control, which works fine. – Paul McMillan Oct 21 '10 at 16:11

pQd · Answer 8 · 2009-05-21T14:38:31.503

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i'm quite happy user of dokuwiki. in my case it's authenticating users against Active Directory via LDAP.

i can see there is WYSIWYG plugin, but i've never used it.

edited May 21 '09 at 14:38

answered May 21 '09 at 08:43

pQd

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We've managed to convince our users to figure out the Dokuwiki syntax, which has been something of a miracle. Works reasonably well for them now though. – Paul McMillan Oct 21 '10 at 16:12

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered May 27 '09 at 09:15

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Foswiki has a WYSIWYG editor, see it in action in the highlight video on the home page.

answered May 27 '09 at 09:15

Sam Hasler

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score 1 · Answer 10 · answered May 21 '09 at 06:25

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We have successfully used Open Wiki : http://www.openwiki.com/

answered May 21 '09 at 06:25

Alex Andronov

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score 1 · Answer 11 · answered May 21 '09 at 12:55

Fitnesse is the easiest to install that I've used, but it is very limited (formatting and file handling).

I've been using Trac for project management, SVN repository browsing, and issue tracking, and its wiki is very nice. Of course, it isn't just a wiki, so it may be confusing to have the other features if you aren't using them. Trac is my current favorite.

I've used MediaWiki in the past. The set up was tougher, but the wiki capabilities are excellent. It is the software that drives Wikipedia. It is tougher to set up than Fitnesse and Trac, though.

I've never administered a Confluence installation, but I've used the wiki and it is great, but not free. If installation and administration is anything like Atlassian's other products, it will be a breeze. Or you can use it hosted by Atlassian and avoid installation entirely.

There are so many options with so many different features, your best bet is to follow stukelly's advice and check out the WikiMatrix.

I found Mediawiki to be a breeze to set up in comparison to Trac. Once I moved to Ubuntu both became easy - apt-get install trac/mediawiki. — ceejayoz, May 26 '09 at 17:58

score 1 · Answer 12 · answered Jun 01 '09 at 20:26

One good wiki solution we're using is XWiki. I recommend it for the following reasons:

speed, both perceived ( client ) and actual ( server );
scriptability - you can customise your pages using Velocity, Groovy, Python and ( not sure ) Ruby;
good WYSYWIG editor;
active development;
good turnaround time on reported defects.

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered May 21 '09 at 06:33

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We have one we use internally at work which I believe is based on Tikiwiki. There are literally hundreds out there and most are free. Tikiwiki and Mediawiki seem like good choices.

Tikiwiki is very well supported and has very recent releases.

answered May 21 '09 at 06:33

WerkkreW

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score 0 · Answer 14 · answered May 21 '09 at 09:40

We use Community Server, which has a decent wiki. Unfortunately it's only in the Professional edition or above, and Telligent has recently gone off the deep end as far as licensing costs, IMO.

We've also used mindtouch's Dekiwiki, which is pretty solid.

score 0 · Answer 15 · answered May 21 '09 at 09:46

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We use Twiki (http://twiki.org/) at Motorola and it works pretty well

answered May 21 '09 at 09:46

Naseer

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Note, I wouldn't do a new deployment of Twiki right now. Due to the founder of the project attempting to completely takeover the community developed project, pretty much the entire development community has abandoned Twiki in favor of a fork, Foswiki (http://foswiki.org/). I'd strongly recommend choosing that over Twiki for new deployments. – Christopher Cashell Jun 10 '09 at 16:33
I wouldn't go there. We had an installation of twiki that began ok, but things began to deteriorate afterward. Also, there is no easy configuration, and the WYSIWYG editor corrupts text now and then - especially tables. – David Rabinowitz Dec 22 '10 at 07:17

score 0 · Answer 16 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

From my answer to #10023:

At my workplace, I dropped ScrewTurn Wiki on one of our Windows dev servers and hooked it up to our SQL Server. It works really well, runs quickly, and mainly stays out of our way for documentation. In the two weeks since it's been deployed, we've already added about 60 pages of information, and it's only for our team (~10 people).

So far, we keep information about current and past projects on there, and have started adding information about the applications such as how to build them from scratch, URL's, and other important information for dev's new to the team.

One of my favorite pages on the wiki has been the tools and libraries page. There, we've started adding information about our favorite productivity tools and libraries that we use a lot, an example of which is grepWin for text searching in Windows.

I would fully recommend checking out the full gamut of wiki's available and find one that suits your intended usage, functionality, and deployment environment. I chose ScrewTurn because it's easy to use, and we had a ton of free room on our local WinServer, but YMMV.

score 0 · Answer 17 · answered May 27 '09 at 05:58

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I found a hosted solution that has a great interface and a very easy to use wysiwyg editor. The name of the service is pbworks

answered May 27 '09 at 05:58

Shard

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score 0 · Answer 18 · answered May 27 '09 at 06:56

I would suggest you look at a comparison page AFTER you've had a sit down and thought about exactly what you need. Do you need to backup the wiki, and how does it fit in with your existing infrastructure.

A comparison of wikis is on this wikipedia. Look at the "Comparison_of_wiki_software".

score 0 · Answer 19 · answered May 29 '09 at 19:28

I'll put my bias right out front - I work for Microsoft and am the program manager responsible for the next version of SharePoint wikis.

I think that for customers who have a SharePoint environment set up already, the wiki in SharePoint 2007 is a reasonable alternative.

A blog post by one our MVPs describing SharePoint wikis: http://woodywindy.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!773832677F575173!653.entry

We're not quite ready to share what we're up to next release, but be sure to keep your eyes out for announcements about SharePoint 2010.

score 0 · Answer 20 · answered May 29 '09 at 19:41

We're currently using Alfresco as an Open Source replacement for Sharepoint. Our userbase is non technical and they're using it without any complaints or problems. You can download a pre-configured Vmware VM from Enspeed if you want to give it a try. It supports uploading information trough SMB and Webdav also and Active Directory integration.

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Good internal wiki software

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