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Confluence vs Mediawiki
March 15, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
25★
Confluence provides one place for technical teams to collaborate—create, share, and discuss your ideas, files, minutes, specs, mockups, diagrams, and projects. A rich editor, deep Office and JIRA integration, and powerful plugins help teams collaboratively develop technical docs, intranets, and knowledge bases.
11★
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database.
In the grand scheme of things, Confluence and MediaWiki are two rather remarkable tools for wrangling knowledge and ensuring it doesn't escape in a cloud of confusion. Both can be used to corral documentation, both keep track of edits like an obsessive librarian noting every minor change in a thousand-year-old manuscript and both allow a collection of humans to collaborate, argue and create in a surprisingly efficient manner. Also, both are open-source, though Confluence has some subscription-based bells and whistles that are, frankly, much too flashy for its own good.
Now, if you were to lean towards Confluence, you’d find it is distinctly suited to the needs of large organizations with a penchant for enterprise-level tools. It hails from the land of Australia, where Atlassian first unleashed it upon the world in 2004. Designed to keep businesses running smoother than a greased kangaroo on a trampoline, it integrates seamlessly with tools like Jira and Trello. A bit of a show-off, Confluence boasts a snazzy interface with drag-and-drop features and options for both cloud-based and on-premises installations. It’s quite the polished performer, though perhaps a bit too tidy for those who prefer their tools a touch more eccentric.
Then, there’s MediaWiki, which arrived a couple of years earlier in 2002, courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation in the United States. If Confluence is the corporate office manager, MediaWiki is the quirky, low-budget, open-source librarian, free to anyone who wants it but more comfortable in its stripped-down simplicity. It’s tailor-made for projects where people need to scribble down encyclopedic knowledge at a monumental scale—Wikipedia, for instance. While the interface is somewhat utilitarian, it's a flexible beast that’s as comfortable supporting a handful of pages as it is handling a mountain of data. You might say it’s the very definition of "free and proud of it."
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
Now, if you were to lean towards Confluence, you’d find it is distinctly suited to the needs of large organizations with a penchant for enterprise-level tools. It hails from the land of Australia, where Atlassian first unleashed it upon the world in 2004. Designed to keep businesses running smoother than a greased kangaroo on a trampoline, it integrates seamlessly with tools like Jira and Trello. A bit of a show-off, Confluence boasts a snazzy interface with drag-and-drop features and options for both cloud-based and on-premises installations. It’s quite the polished performer, though perhaps a bit too tidy for those who prefer their tools a touch more eccentric.
Then, there’s MediaWiki, which arrived a couple of years earlier in 2002, courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation in the United States. If Confluence is the corporate office manager, MediaWiki is the quirky, low-budget, open-source librarian, free to anyone who wants it but more comfortable in its stripped-down simplicity. It’s tailor-made for projects where people need to scribble down encyclopedic knowledge at a monumental scale—Wikipedia, for instance. While the interface is somewhat utilitarian, it's a flexible beast that’s as comfortable supporting a handful of pages as it is handling a mountain of data. You might say it’s the very definition of "free and proud of it."
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
