Open-source knowledge base software: our top 6 picks

Written by

Oana Năslău

, Content Writer Specialist

If you're here, you probably find yourself in one of these 2 situations:

• You're aiming to migrate from a SaaS to an open-source knowledge base.
• You're planning to deploy a new knowledge base for your team or your customers and want to make an informed decision when choosing the right software.

We are ready to ease your research, that's why we've compiled some insights and best practices from our 20 years of experience in creating, customizing and migrating our customers' knowledge bases. They will help you streamline your activities, be it help-desk, onboarding or internal procedures. 

How to choose the right knowledge base tool

When building a knowledge base, it's crucial to consider who will be using it—whether it's for internal teams like HR, the entire company, frontline employees, or your customers. Depending on your audience, the knowledge base solution needs to meet specific criteria. Despite these differences, certain features are essential for all types of knowledge bases. Start by asking yourself these 5 key questions:

#1. What are the search capabilities you're expecting from a knowledge base software?

How easily can your employees or customers find the information they need? Enhance their experience by including powerful search features into the knowledge base. This will help them to effortlessly retrieve pages and various file formats using keywords and refined searches. You will not only improve their experience but also significantly boost the adoption rate of your knowledge base.

#2. How steep is the learning curve for non-technical users?

Simplify the lives of your knowledge base users by choosing a tool that is user-friendly and easy and quick for everyone to learn, even non-technical users.

#3. How easy would it be to migrate to an alternative knowledge base tool?

Over time, you might find the need to switch to a different tool. Make sure that both the previous tool and the new one come with no vendor lock-in and offer reliable import/export options, ensuring a smooth and hassle-free transition.

#4. Does the knowledge base come with multilingual support?

As your team or customer base expands globally, the need for multilingual support in your knowledge management software becomes crucial. By considering this criterion from the beginning, you'll be well-prepared as new countries and languages are added to your employee or client pool over time.

#5 Does the software provider have a reliable and responsive support team that can assist you whenever problems arise?

Everyone expects the software they are working with to be flawless, but depending on the complexity of your knowledge base, the level of customization or unpredictable factors, challenges are inevitable. While these issues can't be entirely prevented, preparation is crucial. Make sure your knowledge base software provider has a dedicated support team that can deliver timely and effective solutions to your issues. This may imply an additional investment. 

Why open source

Freedom to modify the code and innovate

The beauty of open-source code is that it's public, free to use, modify and distribute. If you're counting on a tech team that's ready to tweak the code to have an open-source knowledge base to fit the needs of your organization or customers, then you are already ahead of the game.

Self-hosted knowledge base or Cloud knowledge base? Your choice

One of the greatest advantages of open-source software is the freedom it offers. If your company or project handles sensitive data that also populates your knowledge base(s), you'll likely prefer to deploy the software on your own server. This level of control is simply not possible with proprietary solutions.

No vendor lock-in

Adhering to open standards acts like a safety net for your business, ensuring you won't risk losing valuable gigabytes of data. You have the right to change your mind if at some point, the open-source knowledge base software doesn't meet your evolving team's needs anymore. This sort of flexibility empowers you to make the best decisions for your business without being locked into a single solution.

Reasonable prices

While the standard open-source product is free to use, investing in additional professional services provides a superior benefit-cost ratio compared to proprietary software. This means you get more value for your money, with the flexibility and customization that open-source solutions offer.

Now, let's explore some impressive open-source knowledge base software that might inspire you to identify the ideal solution to optimize your company's knowledge management. 

XWiki

XWiki is an open-source, second-generation enterprise wiki featuring extensive customization, collaborative editing, document management, and granular rights management. It enables companies to create, organize, and share knowledge flexibly and effectively.

With enterprise-level features like fine-grained access control, robust security, and extensibility through extensions and hundreds of RESTful APIs, XWiki is a versatile platform for diverse business needs. It can be used for content collaboration or creating collaborative web applications.

For over 15 years, companies have relied on XWiki for internal and external knowledge bases, documentation, intranets, self-service desks, digital workplaces, blogs, and public websites. XWiki supports full customization and is available both as a free version and as a technically supported one, either on the Cloud or on premises.

🔭 Notable features

• Powerful Solr search engine with advanced and precise filtering capabilities;
• Annotation and comments to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing;
• Multilingual support available in 40 languages;
• Hierarchical structure to organize your knowledge under the form of notes, pages, sub-wikis;
• WYSIWYG, Markdown, and wiki syntax editors for smooth editing;
• Unlimited version rollback, history tracking, and version comparison;
• Seamless creation of collaborative applications for non-technical users with App Within Minutes;
• Auto-save functionality so you never lose your work;
• Multiple authentication methods supported: Form, basic, LDAP, custom;
• Look and feel customization to match your preferences

👍 Strengths

• With App Within Minutes, everyone in your team can effortlessly create structured data apps without any technical expertise required.
• Dedicated support team that provides timely answers and solutions to your inquires.
• You can work simultaneously on the same page with other team members using the real-time editing feature, for enhanced collaboration and efficiency.
• You can easily migrate from other platforms like Confluence with the Confluence Migrator (Pro), ensuring a smooth transition and no risk of losing data or user rights.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• While XWiki is highly extensible, you will need to invest some time and have a team of developers to help with the customization. You can handle this in-house, or you can choose our Cloud hosting option to make things easier.

Documize

Documize is an open-source, self-hosted knowledge management tool perfect for both internal and external knowledge bases. It's built with Golang and EmberJS and works with PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or any MySQL database. Whether you're a technical expert or not, you'll find it easy to use. Instead of the usual folders, you can organize your documentation with labels, categories, and spaces.

🔭 Notable features

• User authentication and permissions with LDAP, Active Directory or Keycloak;
• Reusable templates and snippets catalog;
• Version management;
• Content blocks for editing various section types (Rich Text, code, Markdown), embedding PDF documents, and drawing diagrams;
• Reporting and analytics to track potential documentation gaps

👍 Strengths

• It's easy to get started with the tool since there is no installer, just a single executable.
• You have the possibility to import hundreds of .docx files at a time in a batch.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• Users have reported that it takes a bit longer to receive an answer from the support team.
• There is no auto-save feature for the sections you'll add to a page, so you may risk losing your work if you're not careful enough to save that specific section.

eXo

eXo is an open-source digital workplace platform that brings together several tools for enterprise collaboration and communication in one place. It makes it easy to organize, manage, and share your company's knowledge. Built with Vue.js/Vuetify and Java, eXo is designed to be modern and user-friendly. Additionally, it supports databases such as MySQL and MongoDB.

🔭 Notable features

• Notes feature to edit collaboratively, create tutorials, FAQ sections and policies;
• Searchable tags to capture and reference information; 
• Permission-based, full-text search across the entire platform;
• Mobile app to allow users to connect to the knowledge base from any location

👍 Strengths

• It works as a unified workplace that boosts collaboration, because it eliminates the need for you or your team to switch between multiple applications.
• Your developers can write their own applications to run inside the platform, by means of various web frameworks: JSF, Spring, Ext-JS, Vue.js, AngularJS.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• You need to use an API to extract data from the database.
• Not so many tutorials to help you make the most out of the platform.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the software platform that powers Wikipedia, that's why it will probably look familiar to many users. Its smooth and easy-to-navigate interface allows you to create and edit content without needing HTML or CSS expertise. This free, open-source wiki platform, written in PHP, is robust and customizable, enabling collaborative web content creation and editing. MediaWiki's extensive features make it ideal for knowledge repositories, content management, public wikis, and collaborative documentation.

🔭 Notable features

• Easy and intuitive wiki syntax and WYSIWYG editor for non-technical users;
• Revision history and rollback features for content management;
• Multilingual support in over 300 languages to enable global collaboration;
• Plugins and extensions for customization purposes

👍 Strengths

• It has been designed to serve very high-traffic websites and large amounts of content.
• You can create reusable content templates, which helps enhance consistency and standardization throughout your wiki.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• It has a steep learning curve for non-technical users.
• Customizing and maintaining it will require a lot of resources from your internal IT team.

phpMyFAQ

phpMyFAQ is a mobile-friendly, multilingual, and scalable FAQ software that is fully database-driven. It caters to a wide range of use cases, from single FAQ sites to enterprise-level integrations. phpMyFAQ comes with a myriad of features you would expect to find in a knowledge base thanks to its robust content management system, and it supports a great deal of databases: PHP 8+, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, and SQLite3.

🔭 Notable features

• Unlimited FAQs, categories, users, and groups; 
• Multilingual support in 40+ languages;
• Revision system allowing you to revert to previous versions of the FAQ entries;
• Possibility to back up and restore the entire database content with only one click;
• Powerful, improved search experience through Elasticsearch, that includes a list of the most popular searches and a graphical report;
• Smart answering feature by means of a full-text search on all existing FAQs

👍 Strengths

• If you have a team of front-end developers, you can fully customize phpMyFAQ to obtain the desired look and feel for your knowledge base.
• phpMyFAQ is optimized for search engines, as it lists all FAQ articles in alphabetical order and supports special automatically generated XML sitemaps for search robots including the Googlebot. This is particularly beneficial if you have an external knowledge base that needs to be properly indexed by search engines.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• For advanced customization and maintenance, you need PHP and MySQL knowledge.
• It comes with a very limited number of themes.

BookStack

BookStack is an out-of-the-box, open-source knowledge management platform designed with usability in mind, featuring a simple content structure with a book-chapter-page hierarchy and optional shelves for additional organization. It includes a WYSIWYG editor for non-technical users, is built on Laravel, and it uses MySQL to store data. BookStack is suitable for a wide range of use case. You can rely on it whether you're a freelancer, or representing small or medium businesses or a large enterprise looking for an FAQ, forum or knowledge base alternative that is free and open-source.

🔭 Notable features

• Fully searchable content at book level or across all books, chapters, and pages;
• Quick and easy creation of diagrams thanks to the diagrams.net drawing capability built in the page editor;
• Multifactor authentication;
• Page revision history;
• User and permission management;
• Multilingual support in over 10 languages

👍 Strengths

• Auto-save feature for your drafts so you don't lose work.
• Very ease to learn and use for non-technical teams.

👎 Potential drawbacks

• Compared to other knowledge management platforms, it doesn't support that many languages yet.
• The look and feel customization options are very limited.

Closing thoughts

When choosing the ideal knowledge base platform for your company's documentation, consider this: high-quality, reliable and scalable knowledge-base software doesn't have to be expensive or belong to Tech Giants. By adopting an open-source alternative, you're not only supporting ethical business practices but also gaining the freedom and flexibility that open-source software offers.

One final thought: if you wish to support open-source software, it is of great help to spread the word about it. Have you identified a piece of open-source software that you and your company love? Share your feedback on review websites, code repositories, forms, community forums or even social media. It helps other people understand the true potential of these products and empowers the open-source software makers to continue their innovative work.