Why use MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a leading open source wiki software with a rich feature base, has a strong community of developers, and powers the largest wiki in the world, Wikipedia.
It's highly versatile because it has so many features and has a solid set of extensions developed by both the Wikimedia Foundation and third-party developers.
MediaWiki is enterprise-quality software. It is used by many top multinational corporations and organizations, whether internally or externally, including Microsoft and NASA.
MediaWiki vs. Confluence
Atlassian Confluence has been described as a convenient place for teams to collaborate and share information on. It is also integrated with other Atlassian products like Jira and Bitbucket. However, the benefits end there.
Compared to MediaWiki, Confluence severely lacks in many ways, including:
- No way to dynamically generate pages based off of the existing content
- No robust categories or tagging system
- Does not have a robust collection of extensions, because it's not open source
- Inability to switch between visual editing (WYSIWYG) and wikitext editing, slowing down power users
- Poor support for automated updating of content
Confluence is also transitioning to be cloud-only. This might sound good, but it's not. It means Atlassian can now charge companies much more money and take away the control of the company's own data. Meanwhile, MediaWiki doesn't suffer from any of these issues. Here's why, from a company's financial and strategy perspective, that using MediaWiki is much better than using Confluence:
- MediaWiki is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a well-ran entity who will always support its development, so that Wikipedia may continue to exist
- MediaWiki will always be free and open source software
- MediaWiki can always be installed on your own premises, allowing you to take control of your data and its security
- MediaWiki can also be installed on the cloud, your own private cloud, a government cloud, etc., but you are never locked in
- Receive premium professional support for your wiki instance at the fraction of the normal cost
Why should you choose a MediaWiki wiki hosted on MyWikis instead of making your own?
- We don't charge based on the number of users, making our services incredibly affordable.
- Through our many years of experience, we've put together a curated set of functionality that's much more improved from a basic MediaWiki installation, but still has the same great MediaWiki feel that you'll get from using Wikipedia. We also offer a large selection of popular and useful extensions, and offer to install new extensions not yet in our library simply by asking us.
- We take care of performance optimization and data security for you.
- We also take care of software upgrades for you.
- With 9 different levels of privacy, your wiki can choose any privacy combination that's possible.
- We have professional MediaWiki development services available at the fraction of the cost to use Confluence alone. In other words, it costs more to use the standard features of Confluence, without a support plan, than it does to get a support plan AND receive professional development services from MediaWiki experts, who can customize the existing, already powerful MediaWiki software and make it fit your needs.
- We leverage the cloud to run your wiki, and will soon move wikis to run 100% on the cloud. Don't want to move to the cloud, or want to build it on your own infrastructure? We also offer VPS plans and on-premise configuration/maintenance services.
Did you know even Microsoft uses MediaWiki internally? That says a lot about why MediaWiki is superior to SharePoint.
In almost every aspect, MediaWiki is superior to SharePoint.
- MediaWiki is more of a wiki, allowing people to focus on editing. SharePoint has wiki mode disabled by default, and even if it's on, it's hard for everyone to edit the pages.
- SharePoint is very inefficient, slow, and has limited features, while MediaWiki is packed with modern features and can be very fast with the right configuration (hint: MyWikis makes MediaWiki super fast).
- You can't search through a huge shared drive of Word docs very efficiently, nor should you attempt to do so with SharePoint. But MediaWiki has a very powerful search system that lets you find information much, much faster and easier.
- SharePoint doesn't allow you to tag or categorize pages, but MediaWiki does.
- SharePoint costs lots of money, and is now subscription-based. MediaWiki doesn't cost anything, and hosting/professional services are available at just a fraction of the cost of SharePoint.
- If you don't want to pay money to Microsoft anymore, you can't switch off of SharePoint easily. If you have a MediaWiki wiki and want to switch providers, it's super easy.
Often, most people say the only benefit of using SharePoint is the seamless integration between it and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. While that might be mostly true, since they are all Microsoft products, MediaWiki also offers these integrations, and our professional MediaWiki development services can bridge any remaining gap for less than the cost to simply use SharePoint.