I know wikis have been discussed here before, but I wanted to add my two cents after shopping around for a wiki at work and for personal use.
Obsidian
Pros
- plain text storage format
- great at gathering disorganized thoughts without imposing a rigid structure
Cons
- closed source
- many features that arguably define a wiki are either absent or paywalled, like easy sharing, collaboration, and versioning
Mediawiki
Pros
- it's the wiki. Everyone's used and possibly edited a Wikipedia page.
- version history
- close to Obsidian in terms of "write now, organize later"
- Probably the nicest-looking FOSS wiki platform out of the box
- a lot of the features that Obsidian paywalls are built in, like multi user support and version history
Cons
- Articles not stored in plain text
- Has its own markup. Granted Mediawiki predates Markdown but the table syntax is horrendous. The Mediawiki help page on the matter actually tries to dissuade you from using tables and notes that the markup is ugly.
- Extensions are annoying to install
- Absolutely zero access control. You can even edit other people's user pages. There's no way to hide sections of a wiki from the public or from particular groups of users.
- It tries to be all things to everyone. While this makes it versatile, it also means doing a particular thing probably requires knowledge of CSS or Mediawiki's own templeting syntax. Sometimes I just want to have an info box that doesn't clutter the source code of a page.
Dokuwiki
Pros
- Access control finally!
- Plain text files
- Easy to create namespaces, which Mediawiki also has but doesn't want you to go crazy making your own.
- While it's not Markdown, the markup is nicer than Mediawiki IMO. The table syntax at least is miles better
Cons
- Uglier than sin. Yes even many of the templates (themes) on offer aren't much better. The Bootstrap 3 template seems particularly popular, and while it's a marked improvement in most areas, like a lot of frontends that use those bootswatch pallets there are dusty corners that don't work, like black text on a black background.
- Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can't even rename a page?
- Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable).
Bookstack
Pros
- It looks good I guess. Haven't spent much time with it.
- Yay markdown!
- Also has access control
Cons
- Also not plain text
- remember earlier when I talked about "write now, organize later"? Bookstack holds a gun to your head and forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. I know some people thrive under this limitation, but I don't.
Other wikis I've tried but not to the same extent
Wiki.js
IDK, I don't know much about this one, but don't like the workflow of making new pages.
Gollum
Really simple, which is both good and bad.
An Otter Wiki (the article seems to be part of the name)
A lot like Gollum. Doesn't indicate when you link to a nonexistent page. No support for article tags.
Pepperminty wiki
Looks cool but it's abandoned
Tiddlywiki
Steep learning curve but pretty versatile. It's a single HTML file so you can host it on something like Neocities. Really rudimentary search functions
tiddlywiki has one of the most insane search engines from this list. They have a whole filters syntax that can express pretty much anything imaginable, no? I went back to TW from Obsidian because I was tired from Obsidian's trivial search functionality.
Lemme tell ya somethin about Tiddlywiki. Actually a lot of knowledge base software has this problem (I've specifically encountered it in Trillium, Obsidian, and TW).
You have your body where you're austencibly storing the meat of your information. But you also have configurable metadata fields. Obsidian has its YAML headers, and TW and Trillium have separate metadata forms. All three of these have scads of methods for sorting and querying and filtering the metadata but next to nothing for the actual note. But the note is already organized data. It has headings and subheadings and text under those headings. Why can't that be queried? I got into this on the TW forums. Everyone was basically telling me to cram all of the actual data into the header, leaving the note itself virtually empty. Obsidian has its bases feature which does the same thing. Then why not just have a bunch of YAML files? A genuine question, I'd actually love a system for sorting and querying a bunch of organized YAML files almost like a noSQL database. But Obsidian doesn't let you do that. It has to be markdown.
I got off track there, but there it is.
If your note's type is JSON (or TW's native dictionary), you can query it as such in filters.
My search problem is that I rely on metadata a lot. It's natural for me to want a UI that renders machine readable metadata in a way that my brain can process and that requires rich querying capabilities.
I tried them all and, so far, TW wins for me, with orgmode being second close (I like orgmode in vim, but it had some fatal rendering flaws and I don’t feel like using emacs just for notes).