Enterprise Wiki Software and Pricing
As anyone knows who has spent a bit of time looking at different wiki software packages, there are a lot of choices out there. They range from personal wikis all the way up to systems for large enterprises.
Stewart Madder, an enterprise wiki consultant and author of the excellent Future Changes site, has just published his Enterprise Wiki Software Guide, which covers a handful of the popular enterprise-level wiki tools (not alas, including ProjectForum, but that's okay).
His intro discusses some of the features typically found in these products (multiple workspaces, permissions, notifications, templates, etc.), and then goes through a bit of info on each of the tools he included.
As I said, even ignoring features, there's a pretty wide range of software options, some hosted only, some downloaded, some both, and targeting a pretty wide range of different audiences. One way to get a good sense of where they're aiming is with their pricing. These range anywhere from completely free and open source to "we won't tell you our pricing straight off, but will send a sales guy to see how much we can squeeze out of you".
Sometimes, you get the same company offering free or open source and mega-$$$ versions of their software, with the idea to get you onboard easily so you'll think about upgrading, but also to offer a solution to an audience that's outside their target market. Nothing wrong with that.. we have a free version as well, for the same reasons.
If you're curious and don't have the time to trawl through each vendor sites, here's a highly selective summary of some of the minimum pricing options for their downloadable options, based only on what's on their website. As you'll see, most enterprise-targeted products price on a per-user basis, which is normal for larger companies.
Centerstage, a Documentum add on, doesn't list pricing. But if you're already using Documentum...
Confluence (which is a very nice product) starts at $800 for 25 users, $2200 for 100 users.
EditMe is hosted-only and a bit less Enterprisey, which is reflected in their pricing ($10-$50/month, unlimited users).
GroupSwim is also hosted only, minimum $150/month for up to 15 users.
Mac OS X Server bundles its own wiki, no extra charge.
MindTouch provides their wiki open source, offers some free packages, but saves the best for their enterprise customers; no pricing on site.
PBWorks (formerly PBWiki which you may have heard of), is hosted-only, starting at $1200/year for 5 users; again, free options are available.
SamePage (hosted or downloaded) starts at $100/month for 20 users hosted, no pricing for downloaded version.
SocialText, another really good company, offer open source, hosted and downloaded, etc.; downloaded (or appliance) starts at $1000 + $5/user (if you want the multiple workspace option)
Swirrl, like EditMe, is not targeted so much at the Enterprise, and is hosted only ($10-$180/month, unlimited users).
ThoughtFarmer pricing starts at about $10,000 for 100 users.
Traction TeamPage starts at $3750 for up to 25 users.
(Undoubtedly some of the rabid open source types are tearing their hair out that anyone would pay for wiki software at all since there are so many free choices, or having a coronary at some of the higher end options.)
Not that initial price should be the overriding concern of course. There are also maintenance costs, install/admin time, training time... plus of course whether each package suits your needs in the first place, regardless of cost!
But ignoring all that... how does ProjectForum fit in? It's got a comparable feature set to many of those products, so is on par that way, offers either hosted or downloaded options, and I'll try not to say anything about how easy it is to set up! (Oops..).
Our main audience is what I'd consider small-medium groups, perhaps supporting people in a few different departments in an organization, or a more far-flung group of loosely joined collaborators. Our standard pricing for the downloaded version reflects the type of pricing those groups are more comfortable with, namely per-group, unlimited users, starting at $249 for one group (with other free/cheap options).
ProjectForum gets used in larger organizations too, sometimes just with the standard license but a larger number of groups. But we also have an enterprise licensing model, offering the per-user (unlimited workspaces) pricing that larger organizations commonly expect. Minimum there is 150 users for $1000 (though I'll admit we've been known to have our arm twisted a bit by smaller organizations).
So again, while pricing is just one component, it is a valuable indicator when trying to decide if a product is really aimed at people like you, or a totally different audience. Too low a price tells you something, just like too high a price does.
Again, thanks to Stewart for posting the article. If people really want to get the most out of their collaboration tools, you owe it to yourself to at least subscribe to his blog.
