Docs and wikis · cost comparison
Confluence vs self-hosted BookStack: what each actually costs
Confluence on the Standard tier against BookStack running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
There is no bill to beat here. Confluence costs nothing at 10 people, so running BookStack yourself costs you $49.50 a month more, not less. The reason to do it is who holds the data, not what it costs.
- Confluence
- $0.00per month, Standard
- Self-hosted
- $49.50server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $12.00Starter 2 GB, 2 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $1,932 extra to self-host
- Break-even
- neverafter $150 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Confluence | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $0.00 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | -$1,932 |
| 5 people | $0.00 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | -$1,932 |
| 10 people | $0.00 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | -$1,932 |
| 25 people | $168 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$4,098 |
| 50 people | $335 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$10,128 |
| 100 people | $670 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$22,188 |
| 250 people | $1,435 | $63.90 | $26.40 | Starter 4 GB (4 GB) | +$49,210 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 25 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $10.00 | Starter 2 GB at VPSServer: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB disk |
| Backups | $2.00 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $37.50 | 0.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $49.50 | Plus $150 once, for roughly 2 hours of first-time setup |
Confluence at this size costs $0.00 a month. Confluence's own free plan covers teams of up to 10 users, so a team of 10 pays nothing for the licence.
Read this before you price anything
Confluence's Free plan covers teams of up to 10 users. Inside that limit there is no licence cost, so self-hosting a replacement saves nothing.
What BookStack needs to run at 10 people
Laravel and MySQL. The least demanding wiki on this list and the easiest to back up, because it is one database and one uploads directory.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 1.3 GB | 1 GB for the stack at rest, plus 4 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 12 GB | 10 GB base, plus 0.2 GB per user |
| vCPU | 1 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Confluence has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $2.00 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- BookStack is a light lift: one container and no scheduled work beyond image updates. That is why the maintenance line is 0.5 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. BookStack covers the core of what teams use Confluence for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put BookStack
1.3 GB of memory and 12 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Starter 2 GB at VPSServer for $10.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The VPSServer link above is an affiliate link, run through the same programme as our Kamatera link; VPSServer and Kamatera belong to the same group. If you sign up through it we may earn a commission, but the programme does not state an amount for VPSServer. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
BookStack at a glance
| Licence | MIT License |
|---|---|
| Written in | PHP |
| GitHub stars | 19,038, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | v26.05.4 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-11 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | www.bookstackapp.com · BookStackApp/BookStack |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confluence Standard | USD 6.70 per seat up to 100 users, USD 5.74 per seat above that, per month; free for up to 10 users | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| VPSServer Starter 2 GB | $10.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-21 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| BookStack sizing | 1 GB base, 4 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-14, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.