BookStack vs Outline

Both BookStack and Outline promise the same thing — a self-hosted home for your team's documentation instead of a Notion subscription — but they get there from opposite ends. One is a tidy PHP application that a small team can stand up in an afternoon and forget about; the other is a slick, real-time editor that feels a lot like the SaaS it replaces, and asks for a heavier stack to match. The real decision here is not features on a checklist. It is how much operational weight, and what license, you are willing to take on for a nicer editing experience.

Two takes on the same job

BookStack is a documentation wiki with an opinionated structure: content lives in shelves, books, chapters, and pages. That hierarchy is the whole pitch — it nudges non-technical people into organizing knowledge the way they already think about a bookshelf, and the WYSIWYG editor stays out of the way. It is a PHP application built on Laravel, backed by MariaDB, and it has been quietly reliable for years.

Outline takes the modern-knowledge-base route. It is a TypeScript and Node.js app with a block-style editor, nested collections, and a fast search that indexes as you type. If your team is leaving Notion and misses the feel, Outline is the closer match: the writing surface is genuinely pleasant, and it leans into integrations with chat tools and single sign-on.

The core difference: real-time editing

This is the feature that most cleanly separates them.

• Outline supports real-time collaborative editing — two people can be in the same document, seeing each other's cursors and changes live, the way Google Docs or Notion works.
• BookStack does not. It uses a more traditional single-editor model with draft autosave and a warning if someone else is editing the same page. For a wiki that is mostly written by one person at a time, this is rarely a problem; for a team that drafts together, it is a real gap.

If live co-editing is central to how your team works, that alone may decide it for Outline. If people mostly write pages solo and read them together, BookStack's model is perfectly adequate and simpler underneath.

Licensing: MIT vs. Business Source

For a tool you plan to run for years, the license is not a footnote.

• BookStack is MIT-licensed — genuinely, permissively open source. You can run it, modify it, and build on it with essentially no strings attached.
• Outline ships under the Business Source License (BSL-1.1). In practice self-hosting for your own team is fine, but BSL is a source-available license with commercial-use restrictions, not an OSI-approved open-source one. Each BSL release typically converts to a true open license only after a delay.

If "genuinely open, no asterisks" matters to you — and for a knowledge base you intend to own for the long haul, it often should — BookStack has the cleaner story by a wide margin.

Resources and setup

The stacks tell the operational story. BookStack is a two-container affair: the app plus MariaDB. It has a realistic 512 MB floor and rates a gentle 2 out of 5 to deploy — the official image wires up in minutes and there is little to tune.

Outline is heavier by design. Beyond the Node app it wants PostgreSQL and Redis, and — importantly — it does not ship a built-in username-and-password login. You must configure an external auth provider (OIDC, Google, or Slack) before anyone can sign in. That pushes its realistic floor to 1 GB and its difficulty to 3 out of 5. None of this is hard for someone comfortable with Docker Compose, but it is more moving parts to keep healthy and back up.

Which should you self-host?

Pick BookStack if…

• You want a simple, dependable docs wiki that installs fast and asks almost nothing of you afterward — the shelves-and-books structure keeps a growing library navigable.
• A truly open MIT license and a light PHP + MariaDB stack matter more than a Notion-grade editor.
• Your team writes pages solo and reads them together, so real-time co-editing is a nice-to-have rather than the point.

Pick Outline if…

• Real-time collaborative editing is non-negotiable and you want the closest self-hosted feel to Notion.
• You already run SSO and are happy to wire up an external auth provider, plus Postgres and Redis, for a slicker product.
• The BSL license and the extra services are acceptable trade-offs for the editing experience.

Running either on a VPS

Both run comfortably on a single small server, and the gap is modest in absolute terms — a lightweight box handles BookStack with room to spare, while Outline wants a little more headroom for its Postgres and Redis companions. Budget for the database in each case and keep regular backups of it, since that is where your entire knowledge base lives. The step-by-step setups are linked below, and any of the VPS options here has plenty of room for the app plus its database.