ikiwiki vs. XWiki vs. Foswiki

General Features ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Version
2.67
18.9.0
2.1.11
Last Release Date
2008-10-17 (18 years ago)
2026-10-26 (4 days ago)
2026-03-15 (7 months ago)
Last Update here
2008-10-28 (18 years ago)
2026-10-26 (4 days ago)
2026-03-15 (7 months ago)
Author
Joey Hess and the ikiwiki community
XWiki Development Team
Foswiki Community
URL
Free and Open Source
Yes
Yes
Yes
License
GPL
LGPL + Free hosting on https://myxwiki.org for individuals/non profit
GPL
Programming Language
Perl
Java
Perl
Data Storage
Files, RCS
Database, RCS
Files, RCS
License Cost/ Fee
0
0
$0
Development status
Mature
Mature
Mature
Intended Audience
Anyone
Enterprise, Workgroups, Developers
Enterprise, Corporate, Business, Intranets, Personal use, Community building, Educational, Intranet, Extranet
Hosting Features ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Storage Quota
N/A
N/A
Bandwidth Quota
N/A
N/A
Other Limits
N/A
N/A
Topic Restrictions
N/A
N/A
Corporate Branding
N/A
Yes
N/A
Own Domain
N/A
Yes
N/A
Ads allowed
N/A
No
N/A
System Requirements ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Operating System
Any
Any platform supporting Java 21 or greater
Linux, Windows, OS-X and others
Root Access
No
No
No
Webserver
Any, or none
Servlet 5.0+
Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or any other supporting (F)CGI
Other Requirements
Java 21, MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/HSQLDB/etc (JDBC Driver required)
RCS (optional), cron/scheduler, fgrep, egrep; Plugins may have additional dependencies
Datastorage ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Text Files
Yes
No
Yes
MySQL
No
Yes
No
PostgreSQL
No
Yes
No
Oracle
No
Yes
No
SQLite
No
No
No
BerkeleyDB
No
No
No
RCS
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Other
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
caching of content into database using plugins
Security/Anti-Spam ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
Yes
Yes
Authentication Backends
Built-in, HTTP auth, OpenID; extensible via plugins
XWiki, OpenID Connect, LDAP, custom (Open API), Kerberos, NTLM, Headers, PUMA, SAML, Trusted LDAP, Sun SSO
Internal authentication; anything Apache supports such as LDAP, NIS, AD, Kerberos
Host Blocking
Yes
No
Plugin
Mail Encryption
Yes
Yes
Yes
nofollow
No
No
Yes
Blacklist
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
CAPTCHA
No
Yes
Plugin
Delayed Indexing
No
Yes
Plugin
Development/Support ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
# of Consultants
Preconfigured Hosting
No
Yes
Yes
Code Repository
Issue Tracker
Mailing List
Support Forum
Chat Channel
Stars on GitHub
N/A
N/A
118 ⭐
Common Features ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
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 XWiki Foswiki
Unicode Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Right-to-Left Support
Yes
No
No
Interface Languages
1
English
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
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
Email notification
Yes
Yes
Yes
Comments
Discussion Pages
Threaded
Plugin
Categories
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Concurrent Editing
Unknown
Yes
No
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Structured Data
Unknown
Yes
Yes
Links ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
CamelCase
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Freelinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Backlinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
InterWiki
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
SisterWiki
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Image Links
Yes
Yes
Yes
Windows Shares
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Page Redirects
Unknown
Yes
Plugin
Syntax Features ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
HTML Tags
Optional
All
All
Math formulas
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
No
Yes
Plugin
Markdown Support
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Textile Support
Plugin
No
Plugin
BBCode Support
No
No
Plugin
Emoticon Images
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Syntax Highlighting
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Footnotes
No
Yes
Plugin
Quoting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Scripting
safe subset of HTML::Template supported via template plugin
velocity, groovy, ruby, jython, generic JSR223 & very powerful API
JavaScript; Topic Markup Language
Content Includes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Feed Aggregation
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Usability ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Section Editing
No
Yes
Plugin
Page Templates
Yes
Yes
Yes
Double-Click Edit
No
No
Plugin
Toolbar
No
Yes
Plugin
WYSIWYG Editing
No
Yes
Plugin
Access Keys
No
Yes
Yes
Auto Signature
No
No
Yes
Statistics ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Plugin
Yes
No
Orphaned Pages
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Most/Least Popular
No
Yes
Yes
Recent Visitors
No
Yes
Plugin
Analysis
No
Yes
Yes
Output ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print CSS
Print View
Mobile Friendly
Yes
Yes
Yes
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
Yes
RSS Feeds
Plugin
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Plugin
Optional
Yes
Abbreviations
No
Plugin
Plugin
Auto-TOC
Plugin
Optional
Yes
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
XML export
No
Yes
Plugin
PDF Export
No
Yes
Plugin
Office Export
Unknown
Yes
Plugin
Media and Files ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Flash
Optional
Yes
Plugin
Embedded Video
Optional
Yes
Plugin
Image Editing
No
Plugin
Plugin
SVG Editing
No
Plugin
Plugin
MindMap Editing
No
Plugin
Plugin
Media Search
Filenames only
Contents
Contents
Extras ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Image Galleries
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Presentations
Unknown
Plugin
Plugin
Forums
Unknown
Plugin
Plugin
Blogs
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Ticket System
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Chat
Unknown
Plugin
No
Syntax Examples ikiwiki XWiki Foswiki
Internal Link
[[internal]]
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)
WikiWord autolink
Otherweb.WikiWord
[[Spaced text]]
[[WikiWord][label]]
External Link
[link text](http://example.org)
[[wiki syntax here>>http://www.xwiki.com]]
http://www.xwiki.com
External Link
http://foswiki.org/ autolink
[[http://foswiki.org/][label]]
Headlines
Two syntaxes:

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

heading 1
=========

heading 2
---------
= Headline
== Subheadline
=== Sub-subheadline
==== etc..
---+ Level 1
---++ Level 2
---+++ Level 3
---++++ Level 4
---+++++ Level 5
---++++++ Level 6
Bold Format
**bold**
__bold__
**bold**
*bold*
Italics Format
*emphasized*
_emphasized_
//Italics//
_italic_
Underline Format
via HTML: <u>underlined</u>
__underline__
<u>underline</u>
Monospace Format
`inline monospace`

indented block of
monospaced text

tab-indented
block
##monospace##
=monospaced text= and
<verbatim>
multi line text
</verbatim>
Strikethrough Format
via HTML: <del>deleted</del>
--Strike--
<strike>strikethrough</strike>
Superscript Format
via HTML: x<sup>2</sup>
^^superscript^^
<sup>superscript</sup>
Subscript Format
via HTML: a<sub>1</sub>
,,subscript,,
<sub>subscript</sub>
Images
![alt text](internal/image)
![alt text](http://example.org/external/image)
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
%ATTACHURL%/image.png
http://any.domain/image.png
%IMAGE{"image.png"}%
Aligning Text
(% style="... css here..." %)Text
| left |   center   |   right |
or HTML
or CSS
Text Indentation
Non-semantic text indentation through styling:

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

Quotes:

> This is a quoted text
<blockquote>
multi line text
</blockquote>
Bulleted Lists
* item 1
* item 2
* item 2.1
* item 2.2
* List
** list
*** list
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* 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
11. Item 2
111. Item 3
1. Item 4
1. Item 1
a. Item 1.a
1. 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 XWiki remove Foswiki