Comparing XWiki to MediaWiki and Confluence on xwiki.org

@HamsterNL yes it’s been down for several days now… Don’t know if it’s temporary or permanent. However you should know that Caty used it to prepare the comparison pages.

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FYI: I’ve moved the pages to Compare and linked them from the first slide on the Homepage’s Carousel. Thanks for your feedback.

If you have other improvements suggestions we can talk further here.

My ideas and comments on http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Compare/XWiki-vs-Confluence/ :

If possible: Link to the companies or even better if available directly to their XWikis or XWiki case studies… Ask for screenshots and make clear that they benefit directly from the flow back from other XWiki users and the Wiki community!

It becomes so clear when looking at other XWiki installations and settings that so valuable assets are not used and mainly this is grounded in missing knowledge or regarding to brilliant ideas of other users.

I don’t know AFP, EDF, DCNS, EMC, EADS but also SMEs and associations at least not the abbreviations, so use backlinks and use full names if helpful. An industry classification would other help other in their decision to find a quick answer that XWiki could be of interest for them!

I would even rate the strength of XWiki more horizontal and much wider than you did:
As @ben.megson mentioned, the mighty integrated search and the powerful right management are important.
Have you ever used a standard confluence? Awful and even not that powerful in page design and Wiki Layouts.

Than - for my opinion - the collaboration tool aspect comes much too short in XWiki. I have no idea where you want to set an USP according XWiki, but team collaboration and project collaboration becomes more important every day.

For our needs XWiki is the central place organizing our knowledge AND project work at a central place accessable from any place at the world where internet access is available. For us - as many other teams - it is so important that valuable informations is preserved at a central place and by the way eMail flow and eMail communication is reduced.

Every member within a team, every user of a collaboration tool can follow activities of interest and access knowledge when he is in need of it. Every Wiki provides the ideal structure for not only knowledge preservation, but knowledge growth - XWIKI does support it the best way.

I totally agree with all of this points and would like to give the feedback that XWiki also offers an excellent forum and support community, which is a very very important reason in choosing a software based solution!

What I would wish for XWiki’s future ist that there could even integrated a solution for project workflow in agile project teams, like summarized inhttp://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/ProjectManagement1

An easy and ready to use opportunity would bring a big benefit to a broad user group with similar needs. Thinks of a non-profit association organizing an event and splitting it up in several small tasks performed and organized via XWiki. It’s the same in any project within any organization and applies for all industries. The often request for predefined templates can be seen as confirmation or validation for this. :wink:

Therefore, - as @ben.megson mentioned it in the https://youtu.be/G69GUzv0bys this mainly needs an organization change and therefore benefits if tools like XWiki are running smoothly to make this process of change as easy as possible.

I am look forward to valuable insights and fruit-full discussions within the XWiki forum and community how to reach this!

Could you also update the links in the first post? (those links are dead now)

We don’t have this kind of information / details on XWiki.org. We have a “References” page, but the entries are community contributed. For example, would you be available in submitting an entry there?

I’m glad that at least your knew one company from that list. It’s very hard to provide a list of organizations that every user will know. Regarding the “industry classification”, your note has a good point, but it’s mostly suited for commercial sites. On XWiki.org, if this information is not provided by the reference contributor than it’s hard to guaranty the completeness of entries.

What I am going to do is add a link to the “References” section on the word “companies” and this way, users that read the comparison would be able to look into more examples.

We briefly mention this features on the “Classic wiki features” row.

Regarding the solution for Project Workflow, this could be done as an extension (although the Task Manager Application already exists), but currently we are not focused on this. Maybe if more users will be in a need for this, or maybe if someone from the community contributes a new extension or improves on the existing one.

Thanks @Sascha for your kind words regarding XWiki and for your comments.

@HamsterNL I’ve updated the links. Thanks for noticing this.

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I can only repeat, that Project Workflow features would offer benefit to a broad target group and are an excellent opportunity for XWiki to separate in unqiue selling propositions accoding to other tools available.
At the moment there is none solution existent that satisfy this needs and it definitely makes sense to offer within a powerful Wiki solution

The Task Manager Application was a nice try, but does not provide the functionality at all:

The idea behind may be the same and maybe it could be used for further extension, but it really does not help XWiki users in that way…

Within the project area it is possible to define projects, but after creation it’s only possible adding comments or modifying the original project description. The look and feel could be improved as well as the workflow…

A task does look like this:

A project can be divided into tasks, but there is no visualisation like a flow diagram or anything else. Maybe someone of you has any idea for solution, maybe others agree that an improvement would be of general interest.

The main thing that would help is the visualisation of a project with all tasks within. Than second, a logic for defining efforts related to tasks and summarized on project level would be very helpful. For me it is obvious that only few XWiki users find this existing extension helpfull…

Isn’t it a worthwile goal for further development of XWiki to have Jira-like (or even improved!) workflow within XWiki? :wink:

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We discussed about a better Task Manager application done with XWiki a long time ago.
Personally I would prefer to focus on the main use cases of XWiki instead of adding new ones.

Hey,

2 or 3 weeks ago, I came across your website while looking around for products as an alternative to Atlassian’s tool stack. As an Atlassian consultant, I got immediately fond of the look and feel of XWiki, also of the integration of Jira with ease. Setting up the connection between XWiki and Jira was pretty easy to do: installing the Jira Macro extension, creating a new page, added a JQL Filter to macro, and voila, I got a pretty well-formatted list of all Jira tickets in a project.

My experience with setting up environments with Atlassian products is that customers mostly avoid any hassle with new products. They check labor costs with commercial licenses. And it becomes gradually more important to customize the user interface to fit into the corporate identity. It seems that this is all possible with XWiki.

So, I am open to adding an article about XWiki on our website. Executing some demos, presenting how to connect XWiki with Jira, how to collaborate, and how to build a Kanban board on a page with Jira issues. What do you think about that?

I could be helpful to have an extension like Comala Workflows, too.

Regard this post as a first introduction of myself. With my thanks in advance, I am looking forward to your first response.

Best,

Jens

You could refer to your great support for XWiki. Design, migration, consultancy, training. The page with comparing XWiki and Confluence point to mostly technical things. What is your opinion to list more functional aspects?

Confluence is open-source. When a server license purchased, a button appears in your Atlassian account for downloading all code. It’s a commercial license, free for non-profit, 10 USD for small teams that go to caritative organizations. It probably doesn’t make sense to compare my open-source concept is better than yours. But, XWiki is GPL, and that is different.

I would love to find new customers for XWiki in Germany.

It also is possible to customize Confluence in all kinds you can imagine. I don’t know if it is recommendable to tell a visitor that this would be feasible only with add-ons since XWiki needs extensions as well.

XWiki got developed on top of beautiful frameworks and libraries. Technical aspects like programming languages are only crucial to developers. Decision-makers mostly value to have staff members for getting things done, like customizing a wiki. And Java is considered for professional applications. It is an excellent benefit of XWiki.

Do you know K15t Scroll Viewport? It is possible to choose a space for making it public without the look of a wiki. It is possible to get a search field in the center of the screen to crawl through a knowledge base. It looks familiar to visitors.

Is something similar possible with XWiki? I relate to this subject because of the importance of connecting a service desk portal with a wiki as a knowledge base. That could also be mentioned in the comparison table.

Hi Jens. This is awesome and I’m so glad you like XWki :slight_smile:

Thanks for all your kind words :slight_smile:

Also feel free to jump on the Matrix/IRC channel if you need help/want to discuss with the XWiki developers, see https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Discuss

We’re trying to make xwiki.org an open playing field and separate cleanly the open source project from sponsoring companies. See https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Governance

Now what you mention is possible. We can list all sponsoring companies offering services on top of XWiki inside the Confluence vs XWiki page (https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Supporters/#HCompaniessponsoringdevelopment). However, it wouldn’t be a differentiating factor with Confluence since they also offer this, right?

I doubt it :wink: If you’re a client you can get the code but I highly doubt that the code is under an open source license :slight_smile: That’s very very different. For example, I’m pretty sure that you’re not allowed to get the confuence source code, make some modifications to it and start selling it!

That would be awesome. I’ll send you a private email to put you in contact with XWiki SAS. Maybe there’s a possibility to work out something.

Could you point to the specific text you’re referring to? We want to be very precise.

I’ve checked and what I see is:

Both solutions support lots of extensions (Macros, Blog, Forum, File Manager, Ideas, Meetings, Calendar, Tasks, etc.) suited for different use cases.

However the main difference is that XWiki can be customized directly in wiki pages and doesn’t require to go in development mode as you would with Confluence. For example if you install, say, the Blog Extension, you’ll be able to customize every single aspect of its UI, add more buttons, move them around, etc.

Yes, and so is Confluence :wink:

Nope first time I hear of it, thanks for sharing. I couldn’t easily find screenshots to see it in action. Any pointer?

Regarding creating a web site (ie without a wiki look), you can achieve this with a custom skin in XWiki.

Some ideas:

What would be the advantage of XWiki over Confluence on this topic in your opinion?

Thanks Jens. Keep the discussion going, this is awesome.

Hi guys, sorry to chime in. I was longtime confluence user, before I finally made switch to XWIKI which I love. In the process I made this list of functionalities that I miss the most in XWIKI. Others I was able to overcome or develop, but these would make the transition definitely much much easier. Maybe this end user feedback would be useful to make XWIKI even better piece of software. If you feel this doesnt belong here feel free to (re)move it to different section.

1. custom page ordering
XWIKI:

  • No custom ordering of pages in navigation tree
  • Move of a page to another location is accessible from action menu on the page detail and requires 7 clicks on several pages.

CONFLUENCE:

  • Builtin drag n drop in navigation panel covers both page ordering (move within the same location) and simple move (to another location) just in one click.

Benefit:
Way faster workflow for organizing pages and simple move.

2. faster create page
XWIKI

  • “Create child page” accessible only from page view. You have to go to location, load the page and press Create button.

CONFLUENCE

  • Create page right from the navigation tree (plus sign shows up on hover on item name). It triggers creating of the page right under that parent.
    image

Benefit
Saves several clicks to create page under specific location.

3. content width toggles for editing
XWIKI

  • Content area width is the same for all documents.
    (As workaround it can be styled on document level by ssx but that is not end user friendly)

CONFLUENCE

  • There are two options for width of the mainContentArea, which can be set during editing of the document. Simple switch - fixed width or full-width. Note: it affects how the page will be displayed.

Benefits:
As some documents benefits from narrow content width, there are some (usually longer ones) that require full width for better readability. It would be good to have the switch to be able to set it while editing.

4. smoother mentions
XWIKI

  • After inserting mentions it is not possible to write directly, but you have to click after the label to be able to (I m aware that issue for this already exists)

Thanks @DavidBrazda. Your list seems good.

Agreed. Not easy to do but possible. Could you spec this a bit more? For example right now the navigation panel tree is dynamic (when a new page is added it’s automatically added to the tree). How would that work if you could manually move pages in the tree?

Once we agree about the spec, it would be good to create a jira issue about it on jira.xwiki.org for action.

Agreed too. I don’t recall a jira issue about this one but it’s definitely a great idea and not hard to implement. Could you create a jira please?

Doesn’t this look a bit weird having pages not the same width in the same wiki? :slight_smile:

Note that you can currently control at the page level if you have side panels or not and their width (https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Panels%20Application). Maybe that could help or this use case?

ok good if there’s already a jira for it!

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas. Keep them coming.