At work I use Confluence. Privately I have two options: local Markdown files, or an Astro blog post nobody indexes. That second one is just document storage with extra steps. Neither is a real wiki.

So I went looking for a self-hosted wiki for personal use. One rule: no PHP. I already know that world — TWiki, forked to Foswiki, and MoinMoin. I wanted something else, but with the same quality: boring, reliable, mature. Not a feature list. Something that doesn’t stand in the way of reading and writing documents.

What I ruled out

• Wiki.js — modern UI, but development has stalled. The v3 rewrite has been “no ETA” for a long time. Not what I want to trust long-term.
• XWiki — Java, needs 2-4GB RAM just to run. Built for structured enterprise apps. Overkill for one person’s notes.

Both fail the “boring” test — one because it’s not maintained enough, one because it’s too much machine for too little job.

The three candidates

Gollum

Ruby, Git-backed. Renders Markdown straight out of a Git repo as a browsable wiki with page links and search. No database, no config sprawl — the wiki is the repo. Stable release 6.1.0, actively maintained, and it’s the same engine behind GitHub’s own wiki feature.

This is the smallest possible step up from what I already do. I keep writing Markdown files. Gollum adds a web UI, links between pages, and search on top. Full history for free, through Git.

Trade-off: it needs a small persistent Ruby process running, not static output. Multi-user editing is basic — fine for me, not fine if I ever want to share it properly.

TiddlyWiki (Node.js server mode)

Around since 2004, barely changes release to release — that’s the whole point. The Node.js mode stores each note as a separate file, so it avoids the “one giant HTML file gets corrupted” failure mode of the plain browser version.

Trade-off: it’s not page-based like TWiki or Confluence. Content is organized in small “tiddlers” with tags, not folders and hierarchical pages. That’s a real shift in how I’d have to think about my own notes, not just a different UI.

Ikiwiki

Perl. Compiles Markdown plus Git history into static HTML. Reading the wiki needs zero server-side moving parts — just files. Editing goes through Git or a CGI script. Still gets releases through 2025, built originally by Joey Hess, long Debian pedigree.

Trade-off: Perl and CGI setup feels old-school and takes more manual work than the other two. Smaller community now, so less help if something breaks.

What I picked

Gollum. It costs me the least behavior change — I keep my Markdown files, keep Git, and get a browsable, linkable, searchable wiki on top. Nothing new to learn about how to organize content.

If the tiddler model in TiddlyWiki doesn’t bother you, it has the longer track record. And ikiwiki is worth it if you want zero server-side surface for reading and don’t mind a fiddlier setup.