Confluence v. MediaWiki

A lot of enterprise users will have Atlassian products like JIRA (bug tracking), and may wonder why not use the Atlassian Confluence (wiki) system instead of MediaWiki. This thread answers that question.

Atlassian charges for Confluence, but offers it free to open source projects in an attempt to get more market share - especially with those that wouldn’t normally pay for the product. The highly successful open source project CiviCRM still chose to move their documentation off Confluence even though Confluence was free to them.

There is a comparison chart over at https://freephile.org/wiki/Mediawiki_v_Confluence

Feel free to add to the wiki, or here.

Outside talk

Wikipedia

What does Atlassian have to say?

There is a small thread at the Atlassian community site.

What does BlueSpice have to say?

A much more thoughtful and professional analysis is done by our friends at BlueSpice

Slant

This Slant comparison gives the overall nod to MediaWiki (good), but looking at the cons for Confluence, I don’t see how anyone could honestly support choosing confluence. It’s slow, and search doesn’t work!! A knowledge management system that doesn’t have good search is nothing better than a pile of straw when you are looking for a needle!

Another thing in the Slant comparison is that they give Confluence a ‘pro’ for Great plugin ecosystem; apparently without knowledge of the almost 2,000 extensions available for MediaWiki (which is under-represented because there are many more extensions hosted at GitHub or at 3rd party sites.) While ALL the plugins for MediaWiki are free of charge (and always will be), even basic functionality for Confluence is only available through a paid plugin.

A common ‘pro’ cited for Confluence is the integration with other services; with JIRA being mentioned immediately. However, Confluence does NOT integrate well with services that are NOT provided by Atlassian.

WikiMatrix

https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/BlueSpice-MediaWiki+Confluence+MediaWiki

WikiMatrix is often out of date, and it certainly needs some attention at the time of this writing. Still, it’s a useful resource to get some quick comparisons. Of particular note is Windows Shares. I believe that is available to MediaWiki (and thus BlueSpice). FAQ Tags, and Abreviations are marked as ‘No’ for MW, but it’s easily added with the Lingo extension as seen here. Scripting is marked as ‘optional’ or ‘JavaScript’ when in fact MediaWiki installs support JavaScripts, Lua scripting, and Gadgets in core, or through extensions. SVG Editing is marked no, but see the SVGEdit extension at https://freephile.org/wiki/Svg

See http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Compare/XWiki-vs-Confluence/