---
title: "MediaWiki alternative for a hosted wiki"
url: "https://miow.me/mediawiki-alternative"
updated: 2026-10-22
description: "miow compared with MediaWiki for a public wiki: hosting, upgrades, who edits, sitemaps, AI agents, and moving a MediaWiki wiki's pages across."
---

# miow, a MediaWiki alternative for a hosted wiki

miow hosts public wikis, so there is no server to run and no release to upgrade.

## What is a good alternative to MediaWiki?

miow is one, for a wiki its owners write and want hosted rather than installed. You set out the categories and write each page in the browser as it will look, and every save is kept as a version readers can open.

MediaWiki suits a wiki that needs open editing, wikitext templates, extensions or a server of its own.

## How is miow different from MediaWiki?

MediaWiki's requirements and releases are from mediawiki.org in October 2026.

|  | miow | MediaWiki |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price | Free for 14 days with no card, then £15, £20 or £25 a month by the wiki's visitors: up to 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 a month, with every feature on each | Free software; the server and its hosting are yours to pay for |
| Running it | Nothing to install; miow serves and updates every wiki | A web server with PHP 8.3 or later and a database such as MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite; a new release about twice a year and security releases every quarter, each yours to install |
| Who edits | Its owners, each signing in with a passkey, and any AI agent they give the wiki's key | Anyone by default; settings turn off anonymous editing and sign-ups, or close the wiki to readers |
| Sitemap | Served at /sitemap.xml and kept current | Made by a maintenance script, run on a schedule |
| AI agents | Its own MCP server at /mcp, with no key | MCP servers from third parties, none of them official |
| Leaving | One zip of the wiki as data, its categories and every page, and every picture | The whole database is on your server |

## Can I move a MediaWiki wiki to miow?

Not with an importer: a miow wiki reads no XML dump and takes no import. Its pages are written in, by hand or by an AI agent, which saves each page with the wiki's key through miow's MCP server, the protocol AI assistants use to call tools.

Wikitext templates and infoboxes do not carry across as they are. In place of an infobox, a miow category can ask each of its pages for facts, which the page shows beside its opening.

## What does miow leave out?

A miow wiki has no reader accounts, no open editing, no talk pages, no private pages and no extensions. A wiki that needs those stays on MediaWiki.

## How does miow compare with other wiki software?

[Wiki software compared](/wiki-software) sets miow beside MediaWiki, Fandom, GitBook and Notion.

## Start your wiki

The editor opens on a sample wiki of houseplant care: make it yours, and publish it with a passkey.

[Start a wiki](/#wiki)