When comparing Drupal vs BookStack, the Slant community recommends Drupal for most people. In the question“What are the best self-hosted web-based knowledge management systems?” Drupal is ranked 4th while BookStack is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Drupal is:
Drupal is stable, with powerful version control and access control methods and can handle large amounts of traffic.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for enterprise use
Drupal is stable, with powerful version control and access control methods and can handle large amounts of traffic.
Pro Free and open source
Drupal is free to use and open source.
Pro Active community
Drupal have one of biggest and more active communities across FOSS, maintaining a large and vibrant ecosystem of extensions and installation profiles.
Pro Great templating engine
Twig is a game changer!
Pro Multi-lingual support
Starting with Drupal 8, there's built-in multi-lingual support.
Pro It's easy to transfer config changes from dev to production
Pro Highly customizable
Drupal can be customized to do almost anything. It was built ground up with the intent of using a wide variety of small modules to get the exact result wanted instead of just the most common solutions.
Pro RESTful
Drupal 8 has REST services built in.
Pro Good accessibility
Pro Drupal has full SEO capabilities
(vs Joomla, which lacks SEO capabilities), there is an essential issue for promotion.
Pro Semantic HTML5
Pro Excellent SEO
Drupal was designed from the beginning to follow best practices in regards to SEO.
Pro Responsive front-end and back-end
Drupal 8 follows responsive design philosophy out of the box, both front-end and back-end.
Pro Drupal 8 and higher leverage composer and all of the wonderful PHP packages. Instead of building functionality from scratch, it utilizes existing libraries
Pro Clean & simple default interface
The stock interface design has a modern feel and is simple for new users to use.
Pro Free and open source
Released under the MIT license.
Pro Full role and permissions system built in
Granular permissions can be set up for specific roles on a per-content basis and permissions will waterfall down to child content.
Pro Multilingual
Over 9 different languages are built in to BookStack which can be set at a per-profile level.
Pro Feature rich and stable
Markdown editing, syntax highlighting, WYSIWYG, keyboard shortcuts, versioning, SSO, LDAP, different roles, performant and fast developer response.
Pro Support for domain authentication
Can be deployed within an active directory environment with its features to connect over LDAP.
Pro Supports SSO using Google Apps
Very convenient when you're a company that uses Google Apps, that makes logging into Bookstack more secure and more convenient.
Cons
Con Steep learning curve
Drupal is not easy to get into and out of the box doesn't offer much. To get Drupal doing what you want it to, modules are required. To get modules, an understanding of how Drupal works is required. And that takes time.
Con High resource consumption
A more complex Dupal installation can easily exhaust 256 MB of RAM with only one or two visitors.
Con Documentation is a joke
With currently 3 different version of drupal in active use, and at that constantly changing capibilities within 2 of those, it means that when you look for documentation is if often for a different version that you are running and in addition is not at all easy to consume. Often the info you need is in comment #100 of a thread.
Con Lacks good free modules and themes
Most good third-party modules and themes are costly.
Con Limited customisability
Customisation options are limited with only the main theme color, logo and name being customisable.
Con No support for readable markup languages
The content entered through the WYSIWIG editor is stored as HTML. The HTML can be edited directly, but no other markup language is parsed. Speak ReST, Markdown, etc.
Con Limited to 2 levels of content
Bookstack implements a "Book / Chapter / Page" system which works fine, but lacks flexibility when you need to have more levels of imbrication.
Con Complicated installation
The current installation process involves many steps and may be a lot to take in for people not familiar with setting up Laravel applications.
