head to head · open source
BookStack vs utopia
BookStack has 19,050 GitHub stars, 2,422 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped today. utopia has 9,245 stars, 1,035 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped today. BookStack leads on adoption by 106% (19,050 vs 9,245 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 11%. 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 | ★ 9.2K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | PHP | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 is a self hosted documentation platform written in PHP on top of the Laravel framework, released under the MIT license. It is described by its maintainers as an opinionated platform for storing and organising information and documentation, and it is distributed as an open source project whose development is now managed on Codeberg. The project has existed for roughly eleven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than nineteen thousand stars and over two thousand forks recorded against its repository history.
read the full BookStack overview →
About utopia
Utopia is the world's first open source enterprise world model: a self hosted knowledge substrate with a bitemporal graph and an ontology at its base layer, built by DeepLethe for teams that need agent memory, governed knowledge, and a trustworthy decision core running on hardware they control.
read the full utopia overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is BookStack or utopia more popular?
BookStack has 19,050 GitHub stars and utopia has 9,245. 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 (19,050 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose utopia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.