DokuWiki vs MediaWiki

DokuWiki and MediaWiki are the two long-running PHP wiki engines people find when they want a classic wiki: pages anyone can edit, full revision history, and plain markup instead of a block editor. Both are GPL-licensed and both have been maintained for many years. They were built for different jobs. DokuWiki is a documentation wiki for a team or a project, stored as text files with no database. MediaWiki runs Wikipedia and is built for large, open knowledge bases. It needs a database and was designed to be as open as possible.

Storage and backups

DokuWiki needs "No database", because "it uses plain text files". Pages, old revisions, media and metadata are directories under data/. The backup FAQ says "Since DokuWiki does not use a database, backups are really simple. All you need to do is copy the files." You can skip data/cache, data/index, data/locks and data/tmp. In the official Docker image, everything lives in one /storage volume. The pages are readable text files, so you can grep them, diff them or put them in git.

MediaWiki stores "Most of the critical data in the wiki" in a database. MariaDB or MySQL is recommended "as Wikimedia uses MariaDB". PostgreSQL and SQLite are also supported. A backup is a database dump plus the files the database does not hold: LocalSettings.php, extensions, skins and uploaded images. After every upgrade, and after installing some extensions, you run the update.php maintenance script to update the database schema.

Editing and markup

DokuWiki has its own "Simple wiki syntax" with a toolbar, section editing, locking "to avoid edit conflicts", automatic saving while editing and an automatic table of contents. It keeps unlimited page revisions with colour side-by-side diffs, and namespaces organise pages into an automatic index.

MediaWiki uses wikitext, with categories, templates and full revision history. The download bundles extensions, 34 extensions and 5 skins as of 1.44. They include VisualEditor (bundled since 1.35) for rich-text editing, DiscussionTools for talk pages, Scribunto for Lua-scripted templates, SyntaxHighlight, Cite, ParserFunctions and OATHAuth for two-factor login. VisualEditor is enabled by default on most Wikipedia language editions, and wikitext is familiar to anyone who has edited there. The template system is also much deeper than DokuWiki's, which matters for a large public reference and less for a team handbook.

Access control

This is the most important difference for a private wiki.

DokuWiki has "Extended Access Control Lists": seven levels (none, read, edit, create, upload, delete and admin) per user or group, on a page or a whole namespace (create, upload and delete can only be set on namespaces). The installer creates the admin account and an initial ACL policy. Authentication backends connect it to "LDAP, MySQL, Postgres and others". Its ACL page is careful: if you worry about unauthorised access, "you should never put it on a computer accessible from the Internet". Put a reverse proxy with TLS in front, as the Docker image expects.

MediaWiki is not built for this. Its own security page says "MediaWiki is not designed to be a Content Management System (CMS), or to protect sensitive data. To the contrary, it was designed to be as open as possible." For different view permissions per page, its docs say "MediaWiki is not designed for your usage". Extensions that add per-page read restrictions exist, but the docs say "most of these do exhibit several of the listed flaws". A MediaWiki can be made private as a whole. If different teams need to see different pages, use DokuWiki or another wiki.

Extensions and upgrades

DokuWiki lists over 1,200 plugins and over 100 templates, and supports over 50 languages. Search uses a built-in full-text index. The Docker image has no mail server; its README points to the SMTP plugin for email.

MediaWiki releases a major version about every six months, and each branch gets security fixes for up to a year. 1.46 is the current stable release (30 June 2026) and reaches end of life in July 2027. 1.47, due November 2026, is the next long-term-support branch. Its extension docs warn that third-party extensions "may contain bugs—including, in some cases, security vulnerabilities". Check each one against the MediaWiki version you run.

Install and footprint

DokuWiki needs "a web server and PHP"; the current stable release requires PHP 8.2 or higher. The project's own dokuwiki/dokuwiki image is PHP and Apache in one container, serving port 8080 with a single /storage volume. On first visit, install.php sets the wiki name, creates the superuser and writes the initial ACL policy; it only runs on a new, unmodified install. The image's README says it is "meant to be used with a reverse proxy that handles SSL termination". The pinned tag is stable, currently release 2026-07-14c "Mort".

MediaWiki needs PHP 8.3 or newer for the latest stable release, plus a database. Its docs say that as of May 2025 there are "no official Docker images" recommended for third-party production use. The Docker Hub image is maintained by the MediaWiki community and the Docker Community, and a Docker deployment is at your "own risk". The install also takes more steps. The web installer generates LocalSettings.php. You download it, mount it into the container and restart before the wiki works.

We install-tested both snippets on Ubuntu 26.04 on 2026-09-28. Measured idle on our GCP e2-standard-2 test box that day, DokuWiki used ~21 MB of RAM and MediaWiki ~106 MB. MediaWiki recommends at least 256 MB of RAM for a single-server wiki; we list 512 MB for it and 256 MB for DokuWiki, both our own estimates. We rate DokuWiki 1 out of 5 to deploy and MediaWiki 3 out of 5.

Which to choose

Choose DokuWiki for a team, homelab or project wiki: no database, backups by copying a directory, page and namespace ACLs, LDAP login and a large plugin catalogue. At ~21 MB idle it is also the lightest wiki we have measured.

Choose MediaWiki for a large wiki that is meant to be open, such as a public reference or a community knowledge base. You get Wikipedia's editing tools: VisualEditor, templates with Lua, categories and talk pages. Plan for a database, an upgrade routine with update.php and no per-page read permissions.

Choosing between MediaWiki and DokuWiki

Starting from MediaWiki, the usual reason to switch is a private wiki that needs different permissions for different pages, which DokuWiki's ACLs cover. Starting from DokuWiki, the reason is scale and community: a public wiki that needs Wikipedia-style templates, visual editing and discussion pages.

For a wiki with a modern editor rather than wiki markup, see Wiki.js vs BookStack and BookStack vs Outline. All of them are listed with the other self-hosted wikis.