XWiki vs. Foswiki vs. PBwiki

General Features XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Version
16.3.1
2.1.8
N/A
Last Release Date
2024-05-09 (5 days ago)
2023-08-05 (9 months ago)
N/A
Last Update here
2024-05-13 (1 day ago)
2023-10-16 (6 months ago)
2010-08-16 (13 years ago)
Author
XWiki Development Team
Foswiki Community
PBworks
URL
Free and Open Source
Yes
Yes
N/A
License
LGPL + Free hosting on https://myxwiki.org for individuals/non profit
GPL
N/A
Programming Language
Java
Perl
N/A
Data Storage
Database, RCS
Files, RCS
N/A
License Cost/ Fee
0
$0
Determined by Solution Needs
Development status
Mature
Mature
N/A
Intended Audience
Enterprise, Workgroups, Developers
Enterprise, Corporate, Business, Intranets, Personal use, Community building, Educational, Intranet, Extranet
Business Enterprises
Hosting Features XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Storage Quota
N/A
No limit
Bandwidth Quota
N/A
No limit
Other Limits
N/A
None
Topic Restrictions
N/A
None
Corporate Branding
Yes
N/A
Yes
Own Domain
Yes
N/A
Yes
Ads allowed
No
N/A
Yes
System Requirements XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Operating System
Any platform supporting Java 11 or greater
Linux, Windows, OS-X and others
N/A
Root Access
No
No
N/A
Webserver
Servlet 3.1+
Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, or any other supporting (F)CGI
N/A
Other Requirements
Java 11, MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/HSQLDB/etc (JDBC Driver required)
RCS (optional), cron/scheduler, fgrep, egrep; Plugins may have additional dependencies
N/A
Datastorage XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Text Files
No
Yes
N/A
MySQL
Yes
No
N/A
PostgreSQL
Yes
No
N/A
Oracle
Yes
No
N/A
SQLite
No
No
N/A
BerkeleyDB
No
No
N/A
RCS
Plugin
Yes
N/A
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
N/A
Security/Anti-Spam XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Page Permissions
Yes
Yes
Yes
ACL
Yes
Yes
Yes
Authentication Backends
XWiki, LDAP, custom (Open API), Kerberos, NTLM, Headers, PUMA, SAML, Trusted LDAP, Sun SSO
Internal authentication; anything Apache supports such as LDAP, NIS, AD, Kerberos
N/A
Host Blocking
No
Plugin
Optional
Mail Encryption
Yes
Yes
No
nofollow
No
Yes
No
Blacklist
Plugin
Plugin
Optional
CAPTCHA
Yes
Plugin
No
Delayed Indexing
Yes
Plugin
No
Development/Support XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
# of Consultants
Preconfigured Hosting
Yes
Yes
N/A
Code Repository
N/A
Issue Tracker
Mailing List
Support Forum
Chat Channel
Stars on GitHub
N/A
97 ⭐
N/A
Common Features XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
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 XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
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
1
English
Email notification
Yes
Yes
Yes
Comments
Threaded
Plugin
Threaded
Categories
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Namespaces
Yes
Yes
Yes
Conflict Handling
Conflict Resolution
Page Locking
Page Locking
Concurrent Editing
Plugin
No
Unknown
Search
Full Text
Full Text
Full Text
Wiki Farming
Yes
Plugin
N/A
Structured Data
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Links XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
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
Optional
Page Redirects
Yes
Plugin
Unknown
Syntax Features XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
HTML Tags
All
All
All
Math formulas
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Tables
simple + complex
simple + complex
simple + complex
CREOLE support
Yes
Plugin
No
Markdown Support
Yes
Plugin
No
Textile Support
No
Plugin
No
BBCode Support
No
Plugin
No
Emoticon Images
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Syntax Highlighting
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Footnotes
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Quoting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Internal Comments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Custom styles
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAQ Tags
Plugin
Yes
Yes
Scripting
velocity, groovy, ruby, jython, generic JSR223 & very powerful API
JavaScript; Topic Markup Language
Javascript
Content Includes
Yes
Yes
Plugin
Feed Aggregation
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Usability XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Section Editing
Yes
Plugin
Plugin
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 XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Recent Changes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Wanted Pages
Yes
No
Optional
Orphaned Pages
Yes
Plugin
No
Most/Least Popular
Yes
Yes
Yes
Recent Visitors
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Analysis
Yes
Yes
Optional
Output XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Printer Friendly
Print CSS
Print View
Print CSS
Mobile Friendly
Yes
Yes
Yes
Themes & Skins
Yes
Yes
Yes
RSS Feeds
Yes
Yes
Yes
ATOM Feeds
Optional
Yes
Yes
Abbreviations
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Auto-TOC
Optional
Yes
Yes
Raw Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
HTML Export
Yes
Yes
Yes
XML export
Yes
Plugin
Yes
PDF Export
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Office Export
Yes
Plugin
Unknown
Media and Files XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
File Attachments
Yes
Yes
Yes
Media Revisions
Yes
Yes
Yes
Embedded Flash
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Embedded Video
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Image Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
SVG Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
MindMap Editing
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Media Search
Contents
Contents
Contents
Extras XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
Calendar
Plugin
Plugin
Yes
Image Galleries
Yes
Plugin
Yes
Presentations
Plugin
Plugin
Unknown
Forums
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Blogs
Plugin
Plugin
Optional
Ticket System
Plugin
Plugin
Plugin
Chat
Plugin
No
Unknown
Syntax Examples XWiki Foswiki PBwiki
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]]
CamelCaseLink or [Free Link]
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.externallink.com]
Headlines
= Headline
== Subheadline
=== Sub-subheadline
==== etc..
---+ Level 1
---++ Level 2
---+++ Level 3
---++++ Level 4
---+++++ Level 5
---++++++ Level 6
! Level 1
!! Level 2
!!! Level 3
!!!! Level 4
!!!!! Level 5
!!!!!! Level 6
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>
<code>monospace</code>
Strikethrough Format
--Strike--
<strike>strikethrough</strike>
-strikethrough-
Superscript Format
^^superscript^^
<sup>superscript</sup>
<sup>superscript</sup>
Subscript Format
,,subscript,,
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sub>subscript</sub>
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"}%
[http://www.imagelocation.com/image.jpg
Aligning Text
(% style="... css here..." %)Text
| left |   center   |   right |
or HTML
or CSS
<left>, <center>, <right>
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>
Indented block
Bulleted Lists
* List
** list
*** list
* Item 1
* Item 1.1
* Item 2
* Bullet #1
* Bullet #2
** SubBullet #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
# Number #1
# Number #2
Definition Lists
; term
: definition
$ Term: Definition
<dl>
</dl>
Horizontal Rule
----
---
---
remove XWiki remove Foswiki remove PBwiki