BookStack vs Outline

BookStack borrows its structure from a bookshelf, and that one decision is why people stick with it: content has an obvious home instead of drifting into a flat page soup. It is PHP and MySQL, installs in an afternoon, has a WYSIWYG and a Markdown editor, and does full-text search properly. MIT licensed, around 19k stars, actively developed. For a team that wants documentation to be findable a year later, the structure matters more than any feature list.

Outline is a fast, beautifully judged team knowledge base with excellent search, a slash-command editor and Slack integration that people actually use. It is also the entry on this page most often mislabelled. Outline ships under the **Business Source License 1.1**, not an OSI licence: you may self-host it for internal use, but you may not offer it as a competing hosted service, and the licence converts to open source only after a delay. For most companies documenting their own work that changes nothing. If you were planning to build a product on it, it changes everything — and you would not learn that from the directory that told you it was open source.