BookStack vs phpMyFAQ
BookStack
bookstackapp.comphpMyFAQ
phpmyfaq.deSide by side
| Figure | BookStack | phpMyFAQ |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | £37.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Knowledge base software | 8.9 (#8) | 8.4 (#45) |
| Publishing audience | both | both |
| Authentication | BookStack supports OIDC, SAML2 and LDAP, plus social-based secondary authentication options. | It supports LDAP, Active Directory, Entra ID, OAuth 2.0, passkeys, and two-factor authentication. |
| Founded | 2015 | 2001 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Product | BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information. | phpMyFAQ is a mobile-friendly, multilingual, open-source FAQ web application for building a knowledge base. |
| Search | Content is fully searchable at book level or across all books, chapters and pages, with direct paragraph linking. | It supports full-text search across languages, popular-search reports, and optional Elasticsearch or OpenSearch backends. |
| SSO support | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Official paid support services are provided by HTTP Functions Ltd., while community support is available through discussions, Codeberg, Reddit, documentation and YouTube. | Community support is available through the forum, Discord, GitHub Discussions, and bug reports; professional services include consulting, installation, training, and priority bug fixes. |
| Version history | Yes | Yes |
Plans
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.