ikiwiki vs. Foswiki vs. MediaWiki

General Features ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Version
2.67
2.1.11
1.45.3
Last Release Date
2008-10-17 (17 years ago)
2026-03-15 (4 months ago)
2025-12-04 (7 months ago)
Last Update here
2008-10-28 (17 years ago)
2026-03-15 (4 months ago)
2026-06-03 (1 month ago)
Author
Joey Hess and the ikiwiki community
Foswiki Community
Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, and others.
URL
Free and Open Source
Yes
Yes
Yes
License
GPL
GPL
GPL
Programming Language
Perl
Perl
PHP
Data Storage
Files, RCS
Files, RCS
Database
License Cost/ Fee
0
$0
0
Development status
Mature
Mature
Mature
Intended Audience
Anyone
Enterprise, Corporate, Business, Intranets, Personal use, Community building, Educational, Intranet, Extranet
End Users/Desktop, Education
System Requirements ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Operating System
Any
Linux, Windows, OS-X and others
*nix, Windows, Mac OS X
Root Access
No
No
No
Webserver
Any, or none
Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or any other supporting (F)CGI
Any with PHP support
Other Requirements
RCS (optional), cron/scheduler, fgrep, egrep; Plugins may have additional dependencies
none
Datastorage ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Text Files
Yes
Yes
No
MySQL
No
No
Yes
PostgreSQL
No
No
Yes
Oracle
No
No
No
SQLite
No
No
Yes
BerkeleyDB
No
No
No
RCS
Yes
Yes
No
Other
caching of content into database using plugins
No
Security/Anti-Spam ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
Yes
No
Authentication Backends
Built-in, HTTP auth, OpenID; extensible via plugins
Internal authentication; anything Apache supports such as LDAP, NIS, AD, Kerberos
Yes
Host Blocking
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Mail Encryption
Yes
Yes
Plugin
nofollow
No
Yes
Optional
Blacklist
Yes
Plugin
Yes
CAPTCHA
No
Plugin
Plugin
Delayed Indexing
No
Plugin
No
Development/Support ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
# of Consultants
Preconfigured Hosting
No
Yes
Yes
Code Repository
Issue Tracker
Mailing List
Support Forum
Chat Channel
Stars on GitHub
N/A
118 ⭐
N/A
Common Features ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Preview
Yes
Yes
Yes
Minor Changes
No
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
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Plugin System
Yes
Yes
Yes
Special Features ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Unicode Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Right-to-Left Support
Yes
No
Yes
Interface Languages
1
English
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
140
Afar, Abkhazian, Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Assamese, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Bihari, Bislama, Bengali; Bangla, Tibetan, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Bhutani, Greek, English, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Basque, Persian, Finnish, Fiji, Faroese, French, Frisian, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Galician, Guarani, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Armenian, Interlingua, Indonesian, Interlingue, Inupiak, Icelandic, Italian, Inuktitut, Japanese, Georgian, Kazakh, Greenlandic, Cambodian, Kannada, Korean, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Kirghiz, Latin, Lingala, Laothian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Lettish, Malagasy, Maori, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Moldavian, Marathi, Malay, Maltese, Burmese, Nauru, Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian, Occitan, Oromo, Oriya, Punjabi, Polish, Pashto, Pushto, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Quechua, Rhaeto-Romance, Kirundi, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Sangho, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Samoan, Shona, Somali, Albanian, Serbian, Siswati, Sesotho, Sundanese, Swedish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Tajik, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkmen, Tagalog, Setswana, Tonga, Turkish, Tsonga, Tatar, Twi, Uighur, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Volapuk, Wolof, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zhuang, Chinese, Chinese Traditional, Zulu
Email notification
Yes
Yes
Optional
Comments
Discussion Pages
Plugin
Discussion Pages
Categories
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Conflict Resolution
Concurrent Editing
Unknown
No
No
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Structured Data
Unknown
Yes
Plugin
Links ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
CamelCase
Plugin
Yes
No
Freelinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Backlinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
InterWiki
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
SisterWiki
Plugin
Plugin
No
Image Links
Yes
Yes
Yes
Windows Shares
Yes
Plugin
No
Page Redirects
Unknown
Plugin
Yes
Syntax Features ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
HTML Tags
Optional
All
Some
Math formulas
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
No
Plugin
No
Markdown Support
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Textile Support
Plugin
Plugin
No
BBCode Support
No
Plugin
No
Emoticon Images
Plugin
Plugin
Optional
Syntax Highlighting
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Footnotes
No
Plugin
Yes
Quoting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Yes
Yes
Unknown
Scripting
safe subset of HTML::Template supported via template plugin
JavaScript; Topic Markup Language
Optional
Content Includes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Feed Aggregation
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Usability ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Section Editing
No
Plugin
Yes
Page Templates
Yes
Yes
Yes
Double-Click Edit
No
Plugin
Optional
Toolbar
No
Plugin
Yes
WYSIWYG Editing
No
Plugin
Plugin
Access Keys
No
Yes
Yes
Auto Signature
No
Yes
Yes
Statistics ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Plugin
No
Yes
Orphaned Pages
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Most/Least Popular
No
Yes
Yes
Recent Visitors
No
Plugin
Plugin
Analysis
No
Yes
Optional
Output ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print View
Print CSS
Mobile Friendly
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
Yes
RSS Feeds
Plugin
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Abbreviations
No
Plugin
No
Auto-TOC
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
XML export
No
Plugin
Yes
PDF Export
No
Plugin
Plugin
Office Export
Unknown
Plugin
Unknown
Media and Files ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Flash
Optional
Plugin
Unknown
Embedded Video
Optional
Plugin
Plugin
Image Editing
No
Plugin
No
SVG Editing
No
Plugin
No
MindMap Editing
No
Plugin
Plugin
Media Search
Filenames only
Contents
Keywords
Extras ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Image Galleries
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Presentations
Unknown
Plugin
Unknown
Forums
Unknown
Plugin
Plugin
Blogs
Yes
Plugin
Unknown
Ticket System
Yes
Plugin
Unknown
Chat
Unknown
No
Unknown
Syntax Examples ikiwiki Foswiki MediaWiki
Internal Link
[[internal]]
WikiWord autolink
Otherweb.WikiWord
[[Spaced text]]
[[WikiWord][label]]
[[a link]]
[[a link|with title]]
External Link
[link text](http://example.org)
External Link
http://foswiki.org/ autolink
[[http://foswiki.org/][label]]
[http://example.org The title]
Headlines
Two syntaxes:

# heading 1
## heading 2
### heading 3

heading 1
=========

heading 2
---------
---+ Level 1
---++ Level 2
---+++ Level 3
---++++ Level 4
---+++++ Level 5
---++++++ Level 6
==Section==
===Subsection===
====Sub-subsection====
Bold Format
**bold**
__bold__
*bold*
'''bold'''
Italics Format
*emphasized*
_emphasized_
_italic_
''italic''
Underline Format
via HTML: <u>underlined</u>
<u>underline</u>
<u>underlined</u>
Monospace Format
`inline monospace`

indented block of
monospaced text

tab-indented
block
=monospaced text= and
<verbatim>
multi line text
</verbatim>
<tt>monospace</tt>
Strikethrough Format
via HTML: <del>deleted</del>
<strike>strikethrough</strike>
<s>strikethrough</s>
Superscript Format
via HTML: x<sup>2</sup>
<sup>superscript</sup>
<sup>superscript</sup>
Subscript Format
via HTML: a<sub>1</sub>
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sub>subscript</sub>
Images
![alt text](internal/image)
![alt text](http://example.org/external/image)
%ATTACHURL%/image.png
http://any.domain/image.png
%IMAGE{"image.png"}%
[[Image:wiki.png]]
Aligning Text
| left |   center   |   right |
or HTML
or CSS
<center>Centered</center>
Text Indentation
<blockquote>
multi line text
</blockquote>
: indented line
Bulleted Lists
* item 1
* item 2
* item 2.1
* item 2.2
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* Item 2
* Item 1
** Item 1.2
* Item 2
Numbered Lists
1. item 1
2. item 2
1. item 1.1
42. the value doesn't matter
1. any value works
1. Item 1
a. Item 1.a
1. Item 2
# Item 1
## Item 1.2
# Item 2
Definition Lists
via HTML:
<dl>
<dt>term</dt>
<dd>definition</dd>
</dl>
$ Term: Definition
; term : definition
Horizontal Rule
---
***
___
------------------
Any number > 3
- - - - - - - - - -
spaces don't matter
---
----
remove ikiwiki remove Foswiki remove MediaWiki