BlueSpice as an
alternative to Confluence

A direct comparison of the two specialists for knowledge management.

Why should you choose BlueSpice?

Conceptually, Confluence from Atlassian relies on “Spaces”: You can set up new rooms for teams very quickly and provide them with access protection. However, this quickly results in many knowledge silos and no central places for sharing business-critical knowledge.

BlueSpice, on the other hand, builds on the Wikipedia approach: Knowledge should be as accessible and quickly findable as possible. All knowledge is therefore organized much more “centrally” and captured with a fast and precise search engine. In addition, there are the most important functions for fast and systematic editing, for quality assurance, for mapping complex content and much more. And, of course, extra rooms for teams and projects can be set up with the BlueSpice farm edition.

The following product comparison makes clear that BlueSpice with its features is really worth seeing and that its distributions include many things that otherwise have to be purchased at a high price.

It goes without saying that we consistently develop open source software and, in addition to our growing cloud offering, also create the possibility to use BlueSpice on premises.

For further reading, we recommend our detailed blog article, which is a bit older, but explains many interesting backgrounds as a “long read”: BlueSpice MediaWiki vs. Confluence: The Wiki Alternatives.

Features in comparison

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BlueSpice

Confluence

Remarks

Philosophy Designed to share and find knowledge on a central place with high performance Designed to share knowledge with a selection of employees in various lockable rooms Decisive, if and by whom knowledge is found
Use cases
  • Knowledgebase
  • IT Documentation
  • Technical Documentation
  • Intranet
  • QA, manuals and process descriptions
  • Knowledgebase
  • IT Documentation
  • Technical Documentation
  • Intranet
Technology PHP, JavaScript Java
Open source No vendor lock-in
Server licenses (On premises) Deployment on your server possible (Windows or Linux), at Azure, AWS or elsewhere
Cloud licenses Quick solution for teams and SME
License for distributed architectures (high performance) BlueSpice farm subscription Data center license Necessary for very high workload and operation of many Wiki instances
Other options for technical provisioning Docker & Virtual Machine Docker
Expandability Numerous MediaWiki extensions Plugins available via App Store
Localization Support of more than 25 languages About 25 standard languages
Customizations and services Personal, professional support Via external partners
Search BlueSpice is using state-of-the-art: OpenSearch
WYSIWIG editor Easy editing
Simultaneous editing Create and edit content simultaneously in a team
AI Assistant Write and correct texts more easily and quickly
Wiki syntax editor Maintaining more complex page content
Templates / page templates Maintaining more complex page content
Dynamic content elements (e.g. Macros) Creating lists and much more
File attachments Integrating documents (Office, PDF) into article
PDF export
Word import / export
Advanced & structured forms (semantic) Purchasable App Professional working with forms and structured data is a strength of BlueSpice
Page hierarchy Simple structuring of content
Book functionality Creating and maintain manuals
Category system Sorting many contents (articles, pictures, file attachments) in BlueSpice systematically with a hierarchical category system
Seperate spaces or subwikis for teams BlueSpice farm edition or Namespaces Providing content for access-protected groups
Rights management and easy user administration
Central authentication / single-sign-on
Drafts
Approval of drafts Purchasable App
Review and workflow functionality Purchasable App
Discussion and comments
Read confirmations Purchasable App
Reminder or resubmission Purchasable App
Blog
Skin customizing
Tasks
Integration of a ticketing system Additional customization necessary Our recommended systems are Easy Project / Redmine, Zammad, Tuleap

* possible via external providers and freelancers

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