Quick link: if you’re looking for a Wiki but having trouble choosing on of many Wiki engines, have a look at WikiMatrix.
It seems to have spun out of this Dokuwiki page and provides (primarily) functional comparison of different wiki engines (which is interesting in itself that Wiki software has become so well defined).
Opinion: although it’s a better place to start comparing wiki’s than anything else I’ve seen, to me what’s missing is things like “ease of maintenance”, “performance”, “scales to X pages / hits (link to real site)”, “actively developed / maintained”, “mean time to fix bugs / security issues” etc. But still a good start.
Do you know of any public site that list the above information for any type of software?
November 30th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
You’ve just my day, sir.
Thank you ;)
November 30th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
You’ve just made my day, I mean. Heck, where’s the edit button when you need it :p
November 30th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
nice way of compaeing wikis…. pretty similar to what cmsmatrix.org does with CMS softwares.
November 30th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Sort of silly how cmsmatrix.org has all 486 CMS listed – since you can only select up to 10 to compare at once. Seems like a wizard would be better suited at that point.
November 30th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
10 is a nice number. If you go beyond that, it’s difficult to present information on a single page for side-by-side comparison. Secondly, you use the service only after you’ve made your own shortlist of CMS softwares, and want a feature by feature comparison for further reducing the shortlist to a figure of 3 or 4, at which point you try out each of these on your server… so that’s the idea….
I wouldnt go to that side with the idea of comparing 486 CMS softwares feature-by-feature. That’s ridiculous!
November 30th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
I agree – hince why a wizard would be better suited at this point than even comparing 10 on a feature-by-feature basis… You should be able to create a profile from the choices and have the site output matches and give feedback as choices become limited.
That’s ridiculous!
November 30th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
Not specifically but for many of the projects on Sourceforge, for example, where they’re using a significant part of the services Sourceforge provides (CVS, bug tracker, mailing lists etc) it would be possible guage some of that pretty accurately (e.g. mean time to fix bugs and activity) while other things would need to be “user opinion / review”.
Otherwise where projects are using standard tools like Bugzilla it should also be possible to gather stats automatically. Probably another website in the offing there…
December 2nd, 2005 at 4:50 am
@ Harry
You’re right – I just could not think of it off the top of my head. I personally don’t code much, but do try to keep up on it. Pull data from the CVS use as a measure of the freshness and depth of the project would be of value. Seems likely that Sourceforge would be the natural place to mine it…
By the way, you really do have a great web-dev/tech blog — THANKS!
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:19 am
[...] I am actually quite surprised that not so many people have been weblogging about this particular topic already. We do have some exceptions though with folks such as Nancy White, over at WikiMatrix / Wiki Feature Comparison, or Harry Fuecks with Wiki Comparison or even Phil Windley on Finding the right wiki software. Nevertheless, I was hoping to read some more than what I eventually found out. And main reason for that is the fact that everyone seems to be talking about Wikis but yet not many people have found this online resource interesting enough to talk about when they should have actually done it all along. [...]
December 5th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
I disagree with saurab that comparing more than 10 CMS is silly. I never feel comfortable picking software unless I can start with the broadest possible range of choices then whittle down. That’s an argument for a wizard that, for example, lets you exclude or include tools built with one language (e.g. java or .Net) or is open source. And it would help if these comparison sites included a link to save the results (all 486 from cmsmatrix if wanted) into a single .csv file for offline sorting. I would not recommend you assume that what works for one person (less than 10 tools to compare) works for everyone.
If you’re looking for other wiki resources, in addition to wiki matrix, I’d point you to these:
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiEngines
A list of wikis organized by name and language
http://www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/SwitchWiki
A list of wikis organized by name
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120501/2004/06/10.html
James Farmer’s review of wikis based on the needs of educational institutions
The first two sites strive to provide the most complete list of wikis available. Farmer’s site has interesting reviews.
Also note these lists often don’t include hosted wikis which can be an option for some, tools such as Jotspot (http://www.jotspot.com), Seedwiki (http://www.seedwiki.com), EditMe (http://www.editme.com), among others.
I keep a list of my own on my site, ReachCustomersOnline.com, on my Resources page, under the Software: Wikis link, if that is helpful.
Tim
January 4th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
[...] SitePoint [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 6:24 am
Just to let you know: WikiMatrix now has a wizard to narrow down the choices of available Wikis. Just try the Wiki Choice Wizard
February 16th, 2006 at 9:18 am
[...] Following on from wikimatrix.org the same team has now put together forummatrix.org—not yet a comprehensive list but some familiar names already online for comparison. [...]
June 28th, 2006 at 11:08 pm