Bloomfire vs BookStack
Bloomfire
bloomfire.com
BookStack
bookstackapp.comSide by side
| Figure | Bloomfire | BookStack |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | £37.50/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 4 |
| Spec score · HR Knowledge Base Software | 8.0 (#14) | 9.0 (#2) |
| Spec score · Knowledge base software | 8.0 (#75) | 8.9 (#8) |
| Spec score · Knowledge Management Software | 8.0 (#22) | 9.0 (#2) |
| Publishing audience | both | both |
| Founded | 2010 | 2015 |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Product | Bloomfire describes its platform as AI-based knowledge management, enterprise search, and business intelligence software. | BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information. |
| Search | Bloomfire says it deep-indexes content across formats and locations, including slides, audio, and video. | Content is fully searchable at book level or across all books, chapters and pages, with direct paragraph linking. |
| Security | Bloomfire states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and encrypts data at rest and user data in transit. | BookStack supports CSP headers to increase protection against malicious content and stores MFA secrets encrypted in the database. |
| SSO support | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The pricing page describes implementation guidance and ongoing customer success support, with premium support for enterprise deployments. | Official paid support services are provided by HTTP Functions Ltd., while community support is available through discussions, Codeberg, Reddit, documentation and YouTube. |
| Version history | Yes | Yes |
Plans
Bloomfire
- DepartmentPrice not published
- EnterprisePriced on request
- TeamPrice not published
BookStack
- BookStack self-hostedFree
- Community SupportFree
- Professional Support Plan£450 a year
- Enterprise Support Plan£4,500 a year
In their own words
BookStack
BookStack is a free, open-source platform for organizing and storing information on a self-hosted instance. It organizes content into Books, Chapters and Pages, with a WYSIWYG editor and an optional Markdown editor with live preview. Search works within a book or across books, chapters and pages, and users can link directly to paragraphs. The editor includes diagrams.net drawing capability. Authentication supports OIDC, SAML2 and LDAP, as well as social-based secondary authentication options. Built-in multi-factor authentication can be enforced by role and uses TOTP and static backup codes. Content exports include contained HTML, PDF, plain text, Markdown and Portable ZIP. The project describes a growing REST API for automation and importing content. The MIT-licensed software has no cost to download and install. Setup requires PHP 8.2 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer, Git, Composer 2.2 or newer and a PHP-compatible web server. BookStack does not currently support shared PHP hosting. Community support is free but does not assure a response, support or resolution; paid support plans are also listed.