Confluence vs. Foswiki vs. XWiki

General Features Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Version
5.2
2.1.11
18.2.1
Last Release Date
2013-08-13 (12 years ago)
2026-03-15 (1 month ago)
2026-04-09 (6 days ago)
Last Update here
2013-08-22 (12 years ago)
2026-03-15 (1 month ago)
2026-04-09 (6 days ago)
Author
Atlassian
Foswiki Community
XWiki Development Team
URL
Free and Open Source
No
Yes
Yes
License
Commercial + Free personal/open source project/community use
GPL
LGPL + Free hosting on https://myxwiki.org for individuals/non profit
Programming Language
Java
Perl
Java
Data Storage
Database
Files, RCS
Database, RCS
License Cost/ Fee
starting at US $10 installed (unlimited wikis)
$0
0
Development status
Mature
Mature
Mature
Intended Audience
Enterprise + Technical Teams
Enterprise, Corporate, Business, Intranets, Personal use, Community building, Educational, Intranet, Extranet
Enterprise, Workgroups, Developers
Hosting Features Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Storage Quota
Unlimited
N/A
Bandwidth Quota
N/A
Other Limits
No
N/A
Topic Restrictions
No
N/A
Corporate Branding
Yes
N/A
Yes
Own Domain
Optional
N/A
Yes
Ads allowed
No
N/A
No
System Requirements Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Operating System
Windows, Linux and Unix variants
Linux, Windows, OS-X and others
Any platform supporting Java 17 or greater
Root Access
No
No
No
Webserver
Apache Tomcat
Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or any other supporting (F)CGI
Servlet 5.0+
Other Requirements
Oracle JDK 1.6.0_4+
RCS (optional), cron/scheduler, fgrep, egrep; Plugins may have additional dependencies
Java 17, MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/HSQLDB/etc (JDBC Driver required)
Datastorage Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Text Files
No
Yes
No
MySQL
Yes
No
Yes
PostgreSQL
Yes
No
Yes
Oracle
Yes
No
Yes
SQLite
No
No
No
BerkeleyDB
No
No
No
RCS
No
Yes
Plugin
Other
caching of content into database using plugins
JDBC Databases and in general any database supported by Hibernate; any custom implementation, as the storage is pluggable. Attachments can be saved on the filesystem
Security/Anti-Spam Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
Yes
Yes
Authentication Backends
LDAP, NTLM, Siteminder, CAS and more
Internal authentication; anything Apache supports such as LDAP, NIS, AD, Kerberos
XWiki, OpenID Connect, LDAP, custom (Open API), Kerberos, NTLM, Headers, PUMA, SAML, Trusted LDAP, Sun SSO
Host Blocking
No
Plugin
No
Mail Encryption
Optional
Yes
Yes
nofollow
Optional
Yes
No
Blacklist
No
Plugin
Plugin
CAPTCHA
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Delayed Indexing
No
Plugin
Yes
Development/Support Confluence Foswiki XWiki
# of Consultants
Preconfigured Hosting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Code Repository
Issue Tracker
Mailing List
Support Forum
Chat Channel
Stars on GitHub
N/A
118 ⭐
N/A
Common Features Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Preview
Yes
Yes
Yes
Minor Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Change Summary
Yes
Yes
Yes
Page History
Yes
Yes
Yes
Page Revisions
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Revision Diffs
Between all
Between all
Between all
Sitemap
Yes
Yes
Yes
Plugin System
Yes
Yes
Yes
Special Features Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Unicode Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Right-to-Left Support
No
No
No
Interface Languages
15
Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Chinese, Chinese Traditional
22
Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Chinese Traditional
40
Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Persian, French, Galician, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Cambodian, Kannada, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Lettish, Marathi, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Uighur, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Chinese Traditional
Email notification
Yes
Yes
Yes
Comments
Threaded
Plugin
Threaded
Categories
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Conflict Resolution
Concurrent Editing
Unknown
No
Yes
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Structured Data
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Links Confluence Foswiki XWiki
CamelCase
Yes
Yes
Yes
Freelinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Backlinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
InterWiki
Optional
Plugin
Yes
SisterWiki
No
Plugin
Yes
Image Links
Yes
Yes
Yes
Windows Shares
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Page Redirects
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Syntax Features Confluence Foswiki XWiki
HTML Tags
Optional
All
All
Math formulas
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
No
Plugin
Yes
Markdown Support
No
Plugin
Yes
Textile Support
Yes
Plugin
No
BBCode Support
No
Plugin
No
Emoticon Images
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Syntax Highlighting
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Footnotes
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Quoting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Scripting
Macros, plugins, widgets, JavaScript and more
JavaScript; Topic Markup Language
velocity, groovy, ruby, jython, generic JSR223 & very powerful API
Content Includes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Feed Aggregation
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Usability Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Section Editing
No
Plugin
Yes
Page Templates
Yes
Yes
Yes
Double-Click Edit
No
Plugin
No
Toolbar
Yes
Plugin
Yes
WYSIWYG Editing
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Access Keys
Yes
Yes
Yes
Auto Signature
No
Yes
No
Statistics Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Yes
No
Yes
Orphaned Pages
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Most/Least Popular
Yes
Yes
Yes
Recent Visitors
No
Plugin
Yes
Analysis
Yes
Yes
Yes
Output Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print View
Print CSS
Mobile Friendly
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
Yes
RSS Feeds
Yes
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Yes
Yes
Optional
Abbreviations
No
Plugin
Plugin
Auto-TOC
Yes
Yes
Optional
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
XML export
Yes
Plugin
Yes
PDF Export
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Office Export
Unknown
Plugin
Yes
Media and Files Confluence Foswiki XWiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Flash
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Embedded Video
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Image Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
SVG Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
MindMap Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Media Search
Contents
Contents
Contents
Extras Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Image Galleries
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Presentations
Unknown
Plugin
Plugin
Forums
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Blogs
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Ticket System
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Chat
Unknown
No
Plugin
Syntax Examples Confluence Foswiki XWiki
Internal Link
[Page Title]
[Link Title|Page Title#anchor]
[~username]
[^attachment.doc]
WikiWord autolink
Otherweb.WikiWord
[[Spaced text]]
[[WikiWord][label]]
XWiki supports 16+ input syntaxes (e.g. confluence, twiki, docbook, mediawiki, xwiki, markdown, etc), see http://rendering.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome#HSupportedSyntaxes for details.

The syntax documented below is XWiki Syntax 2.1 (http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/XWikiSyntax).

[[wiki syntax here>>Space.Page]]
[[Space.Page]]
(Space is optional and is the current space if not specified)
External Link
[http://www.example.com]
[Link Title|http://www.example.com]
[Shortcut Link|PageName@otherwiki]
External Link
http://foswiki.org/ autolink
[[http://foswiki.org/][label]]
[[wiki syntax here>>http://www.xwiki.com]]
http://www.xwiki.com
Headlines
h1. Top Level Heading
h2. Smaller Heading
h6. Smallest Heading
---+ Level 1
---++ Level 2
---+++ Level 3
---++++ Level 4
---+++++ Level 5
---++++++ Level 6
= Headline
== Subheadline
=== Sub-subheadline
==== etc..
Bold Format
*bold*
*bold*
**bold**
Italics Format
_italics_
_italic_
//Italics//
Underline Format
+underline+
<u>underline</u>
__underline__
Monospace Format
{{monospace}}
=monospaced text= and
<verbatim>
multi line text
</verbatim>
##monospace##
Strikethrough Format
-strikethrough-
<strike>strikethrough</strike>
--Strike--
Superscript Format
^superscript^
<sup>superscript</sup>
^^superscript^^
Subscript Format
~subscript~
<sub>subscript</sub>
,,subscript,,
Images
%ATTACHURL%/image.png
http://any.domain/image.png
%IMAGE{"image.png"}%
image:img.png
image:Space.Page@img.png
[[image:img.png||width="25" height="25"]]
image:http://some/url/img.png

Starting with the xwiki/2.1 syntax, also:
image:icon:cancel
Aligning Text
| left |   center   |   right |
or HTML
or CSS
(% style="... css here..." %)Text
Text Indentation
<blockquote>
multi line text
</blockquote>
Non-semantic text indentation through styling:

(% style="... css here..." %)multi line text

Quotes:

> This is a quoted text
Bulleted Lists
* one
** one-two
* two
* three
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* Item 2
* List
** list
*** list
Numbered Lists
# one
## one-two
# two
# three
1. Item 1
a. Item 1.a
1. Item 2
1. Item 1
11. Item 2
111. Item 3
1. Item 4
Definition Lists
$ Term: Definition
; term
: definition
Horizontal Rule
----
---
----
remove Confluence remove Foswiki remove XWiki