BookStack®

Dan Brown started building BookStack® in 2015 while looking for a documentation platform to use for his mixed-technical-skilled workplace. Most service offerings at the time incurred per-user costs, and most established open source offerings didn't meet the mark in terms of design and usability out-of-the-box. The project was first officially announced via the /r/selfhosted subreddit and remained in Beta status for a few years until 2021, when the Beta label was dropped although little changed in development and stability.

BookStack® aims to be an opinionated wiki system providing a pleasant and simple out-of-the-box experience where new users find it intuitive to use with only basic word-processing skills. It provides advanced features for power users without interfering with the core simple experience. The platform is committed to being free both monetarily and in liberty, open source, batteries-included with core functionality built-in rather than plugin-based, and evolving steadily and stably with focus on stability, maintainability and forward-compatibility.

The project is led by and primarily maintained by creator Dan Brown. There are significant community members who work to translate BookStack® into many other languages, and many others in the community contribute code, report and manage issues, provide input, and get involved in communities. Outside the official project, there are satellite community projects and offerings supporting the core platform.

BookStack® is distributed under the MIT license, an open source license which allows any type of use, modification, and distribution. The only requirement is retaining attribution to the project including its license and copyright in all copies or substantial portions of the software when sharing or redistributing the code.

The project is mainly funded through donations, sponsorships, and official support offerings. Donations and sponsorships make up about half the funding while support offerings make up the other half, with the support side growing. These commercial offerings are provided via HTTP Functions Ltd, a UK limited company led by Dan Brown, which compartmentalizes commercial activities while insulating the core project from commercial influence.