Confluence vs. MediaWiki vs. PBwiki vs. PhpWiki vs. XWiki

General Features Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Version
5.2
1.32.2
N/A
phpwiki-1.3.14
16.2.0
Last Release Date
2013-08-12 (10 years ago)
2019-06-05 (4 years ago)
N/A
2007-06-30 (16 years ago)
2024-03-24 (1 month ago)
Last Update here
2013-08-22 (10 years ago)
2019-06-21 (4 years ago)
2010-08-16 (13 years ago)
2009-04-03 (15 years ago)
2024-03-25 (1 month ago)
Author
Atlassian
Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, and others.
PBworks
Steve Wainstead, Jeff Dairiki, Reini Urban, Carsten Klapp, Marc-Etienne Vargenau
XWiki Development Team
URL
Free and Open Source
No
Yes
N/A
Yes
Yes
License
Commercial + Free personal/open source project/community use
GPL
N/A
GPL
LGPL + Free hosting on https://myxwiki.org for individuals/non profit
Programming Language
Java
PHP
N/A
PHP
Java
Data Storage
Database
Database
N/A
Database, Files, RCS
Database, RCS
License Cost/ Fee
starting at US $10 installed (unlimited wikis)
0
Determined by Solution Needs
0
0
Development status
Mature
Mature
N/A
Mature
Mature
Intended Audience
Enterprise + Technical Teams
End Users/Desktop, Education
Business Enterprises
Any
Enterprise, Workgroups, Developers
Hosting Features Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Storage Quota
Unlimited
N/A
No limit
N/A
Bandwidth Quota
N/A
No limit
N/A
Other Limits
No
N/A
None
N/A
Topic Restrictions
No
N/A
None
N/A
Corporate Branding
Yes
N/A
Yes
N/A
Yes
Own Domain
Optional
N/A
Yes
N/A
Yes
Ads allowed
No
N/A
Yes
N/A
No
System Requirements Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Operating System
Windows, Linux and Unix variants
*nix, Windows, Mac OS X
N/A
UNIX, Windows, MacOS X, probably others
Any platform supporting Java 11 or greater
Root Access
No
No
N/A
No
No
Webserver
Apache Tomcat
Any with PHP support
N/A
Apache, IIS, anything with PHP support
Servlet 3.1+
Other Requirements
Oracle JDK 1.6.0_4+
none
N/A
various opt. helpers
Java 11, MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/HSQLDB/etc (JDBC Driver required)
Datastorage Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Text Files
No
No
N/A
Yes
No
MySQL
Yes
Yes
N/A
Yes
Yes
PostgreSQL
Yes
Yes
N/A
Yes
Yes
Oracle
Yes
Yes
N/A
Yes
Yes
SQLite
No
Yes
N/A
Yes
No
BerkeleyDB
No
No
N/A
Yes
No
RCS
No
No
N/A
Yes
Plugin
Other
No
N/A
gdbm, cvs, MSSQL, ... (ADODB, PearDB)
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 MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Authentication Backends
LDAP, NTLM, Siteminder, CAS and more
Yes
N/A
db, session, pop, imap, ldap, file, webserver
XWiki, LDAP, custom (Open API), Kerberos, NTLM, Headers, PUMA, SAML, Trusted LDAP, Sun SSO
Host Blocking
No
Yes
Optional
No
No
Mail Encryption
Optional
Plugin
No
No
Yes
nofollow
Optional
Optional
No
Yes
No
Blacklist
No
Yes
Optional
Yes
Plugin
CAPTCHA
Yes
Plugin
No
Yes
Yes
Delayed Indexing
No
No
No
No
Yes
Development/Support Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
# of Consultants
Preconfigured Hosting
Yes
Yes
N/A
No
Yes
Code Repository
N/A
Issue Tracker
Mailing List
Support Forum
Chat Channel
#phpwiki
Stars on GitHub
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Common Features Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Preview
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Minor Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Change Summary
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Page History
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Page Revisions
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Revision Diffs
Between all
Between all
Between all
Between all
Between all
Sitemap
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Plugin System
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Special Features Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Unicode Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Right-to-Left Support
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Interface Languages
15
Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, 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
1
English
9
German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, 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
Optional
Yes
Yes
Yes
Comments
Threaded
Discussion Pages
Threaded
Plugin
Threaded
Categories
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Conflict Resolution
Conflict Resolution
Concurrent Editing
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Plugin
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Plugin
N/A
Yes
Yes
Structured Data
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Patch
Yes
Links Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
CamelCase
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Freelinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Backlinks
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
InterWiki
Optional
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
SisterWiki
No
No
Yes
No
Yes
Image Links
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Windows Shares
Yes
No
Optional
Yes
Yes
Page Redirects
Plugin
Yes
Unknown
Yes
Yes
Syntax Features Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
HTML Tags
Optional
Some
All
Some
All
Math formulas
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
No
No
No
No
Yes
Markdown Support
No
No
No
No
Yes
Textile Support
Yes
No
No
No
No
BBCode Support
No
No
No
No
No
Emoticon Images
Yes
Optional
Yes
No
Yes
Syntax Highlighting
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Footnotes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Quoting
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Yes
No
Yes
No
Plugin
Scripting
Macros, plugins, widgets, JavaScript and more
Optional
Javascript
plugins, templates, PHP
velocity, groovy, ruby, jython, generic JSR223 & very powerful API
Content Includes
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Feed Aggregation
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Usability Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Section Editing
No
Yes
Plugin
No
Yes
Page Templates
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Double-Click Edit
No
Optional
No
Optional
No
Toolbar
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
WYSIWYG Editing
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Patch
Yes
Access Keys
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Auto Signature
No
Yes
No
Yes
No
Statistics Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Yes
Yes
Optional
Yes
Yes
Orphaned Pages
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Most/Least Popular
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Recent Visitors
No
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Analysis
Yes
Optional
Optional
Plugin
Yes
Output Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print CSS
Print CSS
Print CSS
Print CSS
Mobile Friendly
Plugin
No
Yes
No
Yes
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
RSS Feeds
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Optional
Abbreviations
No
No
Yes
No
Plugin
Auto-TOC
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Optional
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
XML export
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
PDF Export
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Office Export
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Yes
Media and Files Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Flash
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Video
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Yes
Image Editing
Plugin
No
Yes
No
Plugin
SVG Editing
Plugin
No
Yes
No
Plugin
MindMap Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
No
Plugin
Media Search
Contents
Keywords
Contents
No
Contents
Extras Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Image Galleries
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Presentations
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Plugin
Forums
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Plugin
Blogs
Yes
No
Optional
Yes
Plugin
Ticket System
Plugin
No
Plugin
No
Plugin
Chat
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown
Plugin
Syntax Examples Confluence MediaWiki PBwiki PhpWiki XWiki
Internal Link
[Page Title]
[Link Title|Page Title#anchor]
[~username]
[^attachment.doc]
[[a link]]
[[a link|with title]]
CamelCaseLink or [Free Link]
WikiWord or [somelink]
[ desc | pagename ]
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]
[http://example.org The title]
[http://www.externallink.com]
http://someserver/someurl
[ desc | exturl ]
[[wiki syntax here>>http://www.xwiki.com]]
http://www.xwiki.com
Headlines
h1. Top Level Heading
h2. Smaller Heading
h6. Smallest Heading
==Section==
===Subsection===
====Sub-subsection====
! Level 1
!! Level 2
!!! Level 3
!!!! Level 4
!!!!! Level 5
!!!!!! Level 6
!!!Headline1
!!Headline2
!Headline3
= Headline
== Subheadline
=== Sub-subheadline
==== etc..
Bold Format
*bold*
'''bold'''
**bold**
*bold* or
<strong>bold</strong>
**bold**
Italics Format
_italics_
''italic''
''italics''
_italics_ or 
or
<em>italics</em>
//Italics//
Underline Format
+underline+
<u>underlined</u>
__underline__
<u>underlined</u>
__underline__
Monospace Format
{{monospace}}
<tt>monospace</tt>
<code>monospace</code>
<tt>monospace</tt>
<code>code</code>
<pre>preformatted</pre>
<verbatim>
unparsed text</verbatim>


##monospace##
Strikethrough Format
-strikethrough-
<s>strikethrough</s>
-strikethrough-
<strike>striked through</strike>
--Strike--
Superscript Format
^superscript^
<sup>superscript</sup>
<sup>superscript</sup>
<sup>above</sup>
^^superscript^^
Subscript Format
~subscript~
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sub>below</sub>
,,subscript,,
Images
[[Image:wiki.png]]
[http://www.imagelocation.com/image.jpg
[ http://foo.org/1.jpg size=30%] 
external image
[Upload:view.jpg align=right size=50x40] 
view uploaded image
[Upload:view.jpg | http://server/external-linkjpg ] 
view and link to another 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
Aligning Text
<center>Centered</center>
<left>, <center>, <right>
<?plugin RawHtml <span align="right"> ?>right<?plugin RawHtml </span> ?>
or <div align="right"> right </div>

(% style="... css here..." %)Text
Text Indentation
: indented line
Indented block
;: left indent
;;: more left indent

or 
paragraph
and another level 
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 1.2
* Item 2
* Bullet #1
* Bullet #2
** SubBullet #1
* list
or
- list
* List
** list
*** list
Numbered Lists
# one
## one-two
# two
# three
# Item 1
## Item 1.2
# Item 2
# Number #1
# Number #2
# list
1. Item 1
11. Item 2
111. Item 3
1. Item 4
Definition Lists
; term : definition
<dl>
</dl>
Term:<def>
def
; term
: definition
Horizontal Rule
----
----
---
----
----
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