head to head · open source
BookStack vs utopia
BookStack has 19,123 GitHub stars, 2,435 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. utopia has 8,667 stars, 1,185 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped yesterday. BookStack leads on adoption by 121% (19,123 vs 8,667 stars). BookStack is written in PHP under MIT; utopia is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. BookStack has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, utopia 14%. BookStack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| BookStack | utopia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 19K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | PHP | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick BookStack if
- You weight community size — 19K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick utopia if
- You want the utopia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and utopia fits your workflow better
About BookStack
BookStack A platform for storing and organising information and documentation. Details for BookStack can be found on the official website at Installation Instructions Documentation Demo Instance Screenshots BookStack Blog Issue List Community Discussions Support Options 📚 Project Definition BookStack is an opinionated documentation platform that provides a pleasant and simple out of the box experience. New users to an instance should find the experience intuitive and only basic word processing skills should be required to get involved in creating content on BookStack. The platform should provide advanced power…
read the full BookStack overview →
About utopia
Utopia Philosophy · Quick start · Features · Roadmap The enterprise world model built by DeepLethe. It is the first open substrate for knowledge engineering that learns passively and governs itself. Where a knowledge graph or a vector store works to hold present knowledge, Utopia puts time awareness and ontology in the base layer: the knowledge system evolves as material arrives, and conflict detection, reasoning and decision making all run against that ontology. It deploys offline, so a company can stand up a knowledge foundation, a decision core its agents can trust, and a compliance audit trail on hardware it…
read the full utopia overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is BookStack or utopia more popular?
BookStack has 19,123 GitHub stars and utopia has 8,667. BookStack has the larger community by that measure.
Are BookStack and utopia free?
Both are open source. BookStack is licensed under MIT and utopia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between BookStack and utopia?
BookStack is written in PHP and utopia in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, BookStack or utopia?
Choose BookStack if you want the larger community (19,123 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose utopia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.