---
draft: false
title: "A Wonderful Wiki With Bookstack"
cateogry: productivity
date: 2026-06-25T00:00:00+08:00
---

# Meet BookStack: Simple, Self-Hosted Documentation That Gets Out of Your Way

If your team's knowledge is scattered across Confluence pages nobody can find, Google Docs shared in Slack threads, or a Notion workspace that's become a maze — BookStack is worth a look. It's a free, open-source, self-hosted wiki and documentation platform built around one guiding principle: simplicity.

## Organized the Way Your Brain Works

BookStack organizes content into three levels: **Books**, **Chapters**, and **Pages**. That's it. It maps to how people already think about documentation — you don't need to learn a new organizational philosophy or fight the tool to find a structure that makes sense. Books contain chapters, chapters contain pages, and everything is fully searchable across the entire system or scoped to a single book.

You can also link directly to any paragraph, which means your documentation can cross-reference itself cleanly — something that sounds small but makes a real difference when you're trying to keep related content connected.

## Easy to Write In, Whatever Your Preference

The default editor is a clean WYSIWYG interface — no markdown knowledge required, good for mixed technical and non-technical teams. But if you prefer to write in Markdown, there's a full Markdown editor with live preview. Both options are first-class citizens.

Built into the page editor is **diagrams.net** integration, so you can create and embed diagrams directly inside your documentation without leaving BookStack or wrangling external tools.

## Fits Into Your Existing Infrastructure

For authentication, BookStack goes well beyond username and password. It supports OIDC, SAML2, and LDAP — so if you're running Google Workspace, Azure AD, Authentik, or any other identity provider, BookStack can plug straight in. Social login options are also available as secondary authentication.

MFA is built in and can be enforced per role, with TOTP support for standard authenticator apps (Authy, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator) and static backup codes.

The permission and role system is flexible enough to lock down specific content and actions by user group, so you can have public-facing docs, internal team docs, and sensitive restricted docs all in the same instance with appropriate access controls.

## The Bottom Line

If you need a self-hosted documentation and knowledge base platform that's genuinely simple to use, easy to deploy, free to run, and doesn't require a three-day onboarding to understand — BookStack delivers. It's a community-developed project with active maintenance, solid enterprise auth support, and an MIT license that gives you full freedom over how you use it.

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Learn more at [federated.computer](https://federated.computer). Want to offer Bookstack to your customers or partners? Check out [Federated Enterprise](https://enterprise.federated.computer).
