Confluence is the default wiki of the corporate world, and it earned that position. But its per-user pricing means the cost of writing things down grows with every hire, and your team's accumulated knowledge lives in a vendor's cloud on the vendor's terms. BookStack is the open source alternative: a deliberately simple documentation platform that we host, configure and support on UK infrastructure for a flat monthly fee. Each has a real case. Here is the honest comparison.
Two different ideas of a wiki
Confluence Cloud is Atlassian's collaboration platform: pages and spaces, real-time co-editing, whiteboards, databases, deep Jira integration and a Marketplace with thousands of add-ons. It is priced per user, billed annually for most teams, with a free tier for up to 10 users. It aims to be the connected workspace for everything a team produces, and for organisations already living in Jira it often is.
BookStack is an open source wiki built around one idea: documentation is easier to write, find and maintain when it has a clear structure. Shelves hold books, books hold chapters, chapters hold pages. On top of that sit a WYSIWYG and Markdown editor, full-text search, page version history and role-based permissions. It is intentionally simpler than Confluence, which is a feature for documentation and a limitation for everything else. It is MIT licensed, and the project explicitly welcomes commercial hosting.
BookStack with Node is that software run as a managed service: we deploy it, upgrade it, back it up, monitor it and wire it into your own Keycloak single sign-on realm, on UK infrastructure, for a flat fee that does not move when you hire.
The per-seat maths
Confluence Cloud Standard lists at around $5.40 per user per month and Premium at around $10.40, billed annually, at the time of writing. Our BookStack tiers are flat: Small at £25 a month, Medium at £45, Large at £75, and the Small tier typically suits teams of up to 50 documentation users.
| Team size | Confluence Standard | Confluence Premium | BookStack on Node |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 users | ~£1,300 a year | ~£2,500 a year | £300 a year (Small, £25 a month) |
| 50 users | ~£2,600 a year | ~£4,900 a year | £300 a year (Small, £25 a month) |
| Every new hire | Another per-user licence | Another per-user licence | £0 |
These are list prices, not a quote, and Atlassian's per-user rate tapers at larger seat counts. The honest headline is not the day-one saving but the shape of the curve: the Confluence column grows with headcount, the BookStack column does not. A heavier instance might need our Medium (£45) or Large (£75) tier, and even the Large tier costs less per year than 25 seats of Confluence Standard. Current figures are on the pricing page.
Feature comparison
| Confluence Cloud | BookStack with Node | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Per user per month; free tier up to 10 users | Flat tier from £25 a month, see pricing |
| Structure | Free-form spaces and page trees | Deliberate shelf, book, chapter, page hierarchy |
| Editing | Real-time co-editing, whiteboards, databases | WYSIWYG and Markdown; drafts and page locking, no live co-editing |
| Add-ons | Marketplace with thousands of apps | Built-in feature set plus webhooks, API and OIDC |
| Jira integration | Native and deep | None to speak of |
| Search and history | Full-text search, page history | Full-text search, full page revision history |
| Permissions | Space and page restrictions | Role-based, down to individual books and pages |
| Data location | Atlassian's cloud, on the vendor's terms | UK infrastructure in your own tenant, Article 28 DPA |
| Exit | Space exports; formats need rework | Open formats; content exports cleanly |
When Confluence is the right choice
Fair is fair. A team of 10 or fewer should probably just use Confluence's free tier: it costs nothing, and paying us £25 a month to avoid a free product needs a reason (data residency is sometimes that reason, but it has to be yours). Organisations built around Jira get an integration between tickets and documentation that BookStack does not attempt to replicate. Teams that live in the add-on ecosystem, diagramming tools, planning add-ons, intranet layers, will find nothing comparable in BookStack, which has a fraction of the surface area by design. And real-time co-editing, several people typing in one document at once, is a Confluence strength BookStack simply does not have: BookStack manages concurrent edits with drafts and page locking instead. If your documentation culture depends on any of these, stay on Confluence, and we would tell you the same on a call.
When BookStack wins
Cost at any real headcount: past Confluence's 10-user free tier, every reader and writer is a monthly fee. A 50-person organisation pays roughly £2,600 a year for Standard at the time of writing, against a £300 flat tier, and the gap widens with every hire.
Documentation that stays tidy: Confluence's flexibility is how large instances decay into sprawling, half-abandoned spaces. BookStack's fixed hierarchy is opinionated on purpose, and it is the opinion that keeps a knowledge base navigable three years in.
Ownership and exit: your runbooks, policies and product documentation live in open formats in a database you can access directly, not in a proprietary cloud you would have to migrate out of by hand.
UK data residency: the whole instance, database, files and backups, sits on UK infrastructure in your own tenant, which is a shorter conversation with your compliance function than a global SaaS platform's terms.
Simplicity as a feature: if what you need is a wiki, a place where written knowledge is structured, searchable and permissioned, BookStack does that job with less to administer, less to train people on, and less to go wrong.
UK data sovereignty
An internal wiki holds the unguarded material: infrastructure runbooks, security procedures, HR policies, customer notes. With Confluence Cloud that lives in Atlassian's multi-tenant cloud under the vendor's terms. With BookStack on Node it lives in your own isolated tenant on hardware we own in a UK datacentre, under UK jurisdiction and UK GDPR, covered by an Article 28 data processing agreement with a named UK processor: a two-engineer company where you know exactly who can touch your systems. That is the trade we exist to offer, and for regulated organisations it is often the deciding factor rather than the price.
Migrating from Confluence: what really carries over
We will be straight about this, because migration marketing usually is not. There is no official Confluence-to-BookStack importer. What exists is community tooling that takes a Confluence space export (HTML or XML) and loads it into BookStack via its API, mapping spaces to shelves and page trees into books and chapters.
What carries over well: page text, images, and the overall structure of a reasonably tidy space. What does not: Confluence macros (they render as plain or broken content and need rework), comments, page version history, granular page restrictions, and anything generated by Marketplace add-ons. Attachments can be brought across but need separate handling and link rewriting.
For most teams the practical approach is to migrate the documentation that is alive, prune the rest, and treat the move as the spring-clean it usually turns out to be. We run the tooling, review the imported result with you, and tell you before we start which parts of your instance will need manual attention.
The bottom line
Confluence is the right tool for Jira-centric organisations, add-on-heavy workflows and teams small enough for the free tier. BookStack is the right tool when what you want is a wiki your team will keep tidy, at a flat cost, on infrastructure you control in the UK. See BookStack for what the managed service includes, the pricing page for current figures, and open source alternatives for the rest of the estate this thinking applies to. If your team is small enough that Confluence's free tier is genuinely the better deal, we will tell you so.
Frequently asked questions
Is BookStack a full replacement for Confluence?
For structured team documentation, yes: shelves, books, chapters and pages, rich editing, full-text search, version history and permissions. It is deliberately simpler than Confluence, so it does not replace the Marketplace add-on ecosystem, whiteboards, databases or Confluence's real-time co-editing. If your team depends on those, Confluence is the better fit and we say so on this page.
Can we migrate from Confluence to BookStack?
Partially, and we are straight about the limits. Page content and images can be brought across from a Confluence space export using community tooling and the BookStack API, mapped into shelves, books and pages, but macros, comments, page history and granular page restrictions do not carry over, and attachments need separate handling. We run the migration, review the result with you, and tell you before we start what will need manual attention.
What does BookStack on Node include?
Deployment in a production configuration, upgrades and security patching, backups, monitoring, and single sign-on through your own Keycloak realm, all on UK infrastructure under an Article 28 data processing agreement. Chris or Matt answer support directly. You write documentation; we run the platform.
What does BookStack on Node cost compared with Confluence?
A flat monthly fee by resource tier: £25, £45 or £75 a month at the time of writing, whatever your headcount. Confluence Cloud is priced per user, around $5.40 a month each on Standard at the time of writing, so a 50-person team pays roughly £2,600 a year against a £300 flat tier. Confluence's free tier for up to 10 users is genuinely free, and for a team that small it beats paying us.
Where does our documentation live?
In a database and file store on UK infrastructure that Node owns and operates, in your own isolated tenant, under UK jurisdiction and a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement. Everything is stored in open formats, so if you ever leave, your documentation exports cleanly.
Do we pay per user or per reader?
No. BookStack has no per-user licence, and our pricing is by resource tier, not headcount. Adding a new starter to the wiki costs nothing; the fee only changes if your instance needs a larger tier.