XWiki vs. Foswiki vs. TracWiki

General Features XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Version
18.4.0
2.1.11
0.11.5
Last Release Date
2026-05-27 (18 days ago)
2026-03-15 (2 months ago)
2009-02-17 (17 years ago)
Last Update here
2026-05-27 (18 days ago)
2026-03-15 (2 months ago)
2009-09-04 (16 years ago)
Author
XWiki Development Team
Foswiki Community
Edgewall Software
URL
Free and Open Source
Yes
Yes
Yes
License
LGPL + Free hosting on https://myxwiki.org for individuals/non profit
GPL
Modified BSD license
Programming Language
Java
Perl
Python
Data Storage
Database, RCS
Files, RCS
Database
License Cost/ Fee
0
$0
0
Development status
Mature
Mature
Beta
Intended Audience
Enterprise, Workgroups, Developers
Enterprise, Corporate, Business, Intranets, Personal use, Community building, Educational, Intranet, Extranet
Software development teams
Hosting Features XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
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
Yes
N/A
N/A
Own Domain
Yes
N/A
N/A
Ads allowed
No
N/A
N/A
System Requirements XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Operating System
Any platform supporting Java 17 or greater
Linux, Windows, OS-X and others
Linux distributions, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and MS Windows
Root Access
No
No
No
Webserver
Servlet 5.0+
Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or any other supporting (F)CGI
Apache, Standalone (builtin)
Other Requirements
Java 17, MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/HSQLDB/etc (JDBC Driver required)
RCS (optional), cron/scheduler, fgrep, egrep; Plugins may have additional dependencies
Python, setuptools, Genshi, SQLite or PostgreSQL or MySQL
Datastorage XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Text Files
No
Yes
No
MySQL
Yes
No
Yes
PostgreSQL
Yes
No
Yes
Oracle
Yes
No
No
SQLite
No
No
Yes
BerkeleyDB
No
No
No
RCS
Plugin
Yes
No
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
0
Security/Anti-Spam XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
Yes
Yes
Authentication Backends
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
File, Database, LDAP (all webserver dependant)
Host Blocking
No
Plugin
Yes
Mail Encryption
Yes
Yes
No
nofollow
No
Yes
Yes
Blacklist
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
CAPTCHA
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Delayed Indexing
Yes
Plugin
No
Development/Support XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
# 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 XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Preview
Yes
Yes
Yes
Minor Changes
Yes
Yes
No
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 XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Unicode Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Right-to-Left Support
No
No
Yes
Interface Languages
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
141
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, Javanese, 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
Plugin
Comments
Threaded
Plugin
Plugin
Categories
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Conflict Detection
Concurrent Editing
Yes
No
Unknown
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Structured Data
Yes
Yes
Unknown
Links XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
CamelCase
Yes
Yes
Yes
Freelinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Backlinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
InterWiki
Yes
Plugin
Yes
SisterWiki
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Image Links
Yes
Yes
Yes
Windows Shares
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Page Redirects
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Syntax Features XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
HTML Tags
All
All
Some
Math formulas
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
Yes
Plugin
No
Markdown Support
Yes
Plugin
No
Textile Support
No
Plugin
Yes
BBCode Support
No
Plugin
No
Emoticon Images
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Syntax Highlighting
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Footnotes
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Quoting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Plugin
Yes
No
Scripting
velocity, groovy, ruby, jython, generic JSR223 & very powerful API
JavaScript; Topic Markup Language
yes, using Python
Content Includes
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Feed Aggregation
Yes
Plugin
No
Usability XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Section Editing
Yes
Plugin
No
Page Templates
Yes
Yes
No
Double-Click Edit
No
Plugin
No
Toolbar
Yes
Plugin
Yes
WYSIWYG Editing
Yes
Plugin
No
Access Keys
Yes
Yes
No
Auto Signature
No
Yes
No
Statistics XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Yes
No
No
Orphaned Pages
Yes
Plugin
No
Most/Least Popular
Yes
Yes
No
Recent Visitors
Yes
Plugin
No
Analysis
Yes
Yes
No
Output XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print View
Print CSS
Mobile Friendly
Yes
Yes
No
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
No
RSS Feeds
Yes
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Optional
Yes
No
Abbreviations
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Auto-TOC
Optional
Yes
Yes
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
No
XML export
Yes
Plugin
No
PDF Export
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Office Export
Yes
Plugin
Unknown
Media and Files XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
No
Embedded Flash
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
Embedded Video
Yes
Plugin
No
Image Editing
Plugin
Plugin
No
SVG Editing
Plugin
Plugin
No
MindMap Editing
Plugin
Plugin
No
Media Search
Contents
Contents
No
Extras XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
No
Image Galleries
Yes
Plugin
No
Presentations
Plugin
Plugin
Unknown
Forums
Plugin
Plugin
No
Blogs
Plugin
Plugin
No
Ticket System
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Chat
Plugin
No
Unknown
Syntax Examples XWiki Foswiki TracWiki
Internal Link
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]]
CamelCase
[wiki:ISO9000]
[wiki:TitleIndex Title Index]
External Link
[[wiki syntax here>>http://www.xwiki.com]]
http://www.xwiki.com
External Link
http://foswiki.org/ autolink
[[http://foswiki.org/][label]]
[http://www.edgewall.com/ Edgewall Software]
Headlines
= Headline
== Subheadline
=== Sub-subheadline
==== etc..
---+ Level 1
---++ Level 2
---+++ Level 3
---++++ Level 4
---+++++ Level 5
---++++++ Level 6
= Level 1 =
== Level 2 ==
=== Level 3 ===
=== Explicit id === #using-explicit-id-in-heading
Bold Format
**bold**
*bold*
'''bold'''
Italics Format
//Italics//
_italic_
''italic''
Underline Format
__underline__
<u>underline</u>
__underline__
Monospace Format
##monospace##
=monospaced text= and
<verbatim>
multi line text
</verbatim>
{{{monospace}}}
`monospace`
Strikethrough Format
--Strike--
<strike>strikethrough</strike>
~~strike-through~~
Superscript Format
^^superscript^^
<sup>superscript</sup>
^superscript^
Subscript Format
,,subscript,,
<sub>subscript</sub>
,,subscript,,
Images
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"}%
[[Image(photo.jpg)]]                           # simplest
[[Image(photo.jpg, 120px)]]                    # with size
[[Image(photo.jpg, right)]]                    # aligned by keyword
[[Image(photo.jpg, nolink)]]                   # without link
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
* List
** list
*** list
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* Item 2
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* Item 1
Numbered Lists
1. Item 1
11. Item 2
111. Item 3
1. Item 4
1. Item 1
a. Item 1.a
1. Item 2
1. Item 1
1. Item 1.1
1. Item 1
Definition Lists
; term
: definition
$ Term: Definition
term::
definition
Horizontal Rule
----
---
----
remove XWiki remove Foswiki remove TracWiki