MediaWiki vs Wiki.js

MediaWiki

• Large public wikis and encyclopedia-style reference sites
• Organizations with a server administrator to install and update it
• Communities that already know how to edit Wikipedia

Wiki.js

• Developer teams that prefer writing documentation in Markdown
• Organizations that want a free wiki on their own infrastructure
• Wikis whose content should be mirrored to a Git repository

MediaWiki

• The manual says MediaWiki is often not suitable when access to part of a wiki must be restricted, because it was designed for open content.
• You host it yourself: it needs PHP 8.3 or later, web server software and a database such as MariaDB or MySQL, and ongoing security upgrades.
• It is optimized for very high-traffic sites and may not suit small sites where disk space or memory is the tighter limit.
• Hosting comes only from third parties: the site lists hosting services that the Wikimedia Foundation neither guarantees nor endorses.

Wiki.js

• The site offers two ways to run it, self-hosting or a DigitalOcean Marketplace image, and lists no managed hosting plan or paid support.
• It requires a dedicated domain or sub-domain and cannot be mapped to a subfolder of another site.
• MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL Server and SQLite will not be supported in the next major version, which keeps only PostgreSQL.
• Version 3.0 is still in beta, and several listed modules, such as the WikiText and tabular editors, are marked as coming soon.

MediaWiki

Wikitext and VisualEditor

Pages use MediaWiki's wikitext format, which needs no knowledge of HTML or CSS. The VisualEditor extension, bundled since version 1.35, allows editing pages as rich content instead.

Full revision history

Every edit is written to the database without deleting earlier versions of the page, so vandalism, spam or mistakes can be reverted easily.

Extensions

Administrators add functions by installing extensions. Some are bundled with the software; third-party ones may be unmaintained or incompatible with each other.

Action API

A web service at the api.php endpoint lets programs log in, read data and post changes over HTTP, covering features such as page operations and search.

Built for high traffic

The software was designed to serve sites that get millions of hits a day. It supports caching and can be coupled with proxy server software.

Image and media files

MediaWiki also manages images and multimedia files, which are stored in the server's file system rather than in the database.

Wiki.js

Three editors

Pages can be written in Markdown with a live preview, in a visual WYSIWYG editor meant for non-technical people, or directly in HTML.

Version tracking

All content changes are tracked. Two versions of a page can be compared visually, and a page can be reverted to an earlier state or recovered after deletion.

Authentication modules

Sign-in can use local accounts, services such as Google, GitHub and Slack, or LDAP, SAML, Okta and Azure AD, with two-factor authentication on supported modules.

Git and cloud storage sync

Content can be synchronized or backed up to Git services such as GitHub and GitLab, or to storage such as AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage.

Groups, permissions and page rules

Users are placed in groups with granular permissions, and page rules limit a group's access by exact path, by how a path starts or ends, or by regular expression.

GraphQL API

A GraphQL endpoint on each wiki reads and modifies all of its resources, using API tokens with permission scopes that are generated in the administration area.

MediaWiki

• MediaWiki$0

  The full software, downloaded and installed on your own server, with help from the community support desk.

Wiki.js

• Wiki.js$0

  The full application, hosted on your own servers or launched from the DigitalOcean Marketplace image, with community help through the project's support channels.