Wetpaint, PBwiki, and Wikispaces

This semester, I’ve been using Wetpaint and PBwikis for my classes, and I have two Wikispaces wikis that I’m using for other professional endeavors. I decided it was time to compare and contrast them:

Features	Wetpaint	PBwiki (1.0)	Wikispaces
My Wikis	Red Rocks Classes ENGL 112	ENG 131 LIT 127	4R x T Renaissance Woman
Cost	Free Professional services available for fee	Free for basic services $99.50/yr for silver plan $249.50/yr for gold plan $999.50/yr for platinum plan Charge per user per month for businesses	Free for basic services $5/mo or $50/yr for plus $20/mo or $200/yr for super $100/mo or $1000/yr for private label
Ads	Removed upon request for educational wikis	None for educational wikis	Ads on free wikis
Styles	24 styles available	5 skins available	4 themes available, which may be customized but knowledge of HTML and CSS required
Nav Bar	Generated automatically Pages can be moved easily Expandable	Must be created	Must be created Not all editing features work well in navigation bar (for example, bullets, bold, code)
Editing	Undo/redo Text formatting Bullets Indenting/reverse Links Images Tables Spellcheck Works very well	Copy/paste Text formatting Indent/reverse Bullets Spellcheck Links Images Table Horizontal rule Insert plugin Source AttachmentsFinicky, especially links in table	Bold, italics, underlining Font color and style (one button) Bullets Horizontal rule Links File insertion Table Special characters CodeText and visual editors floating at top of monitor, preview option, finicky
Widgets	YouTube Google Video Vizu Poll RSS feeds Google Calendar Photobucket Imeem Music Zeemaps Meebo Messaging Gabbly Chat Other (works for Box.net and Slideshare)	Productivity Calendar Plan an event Any Google Gadget Address link Spreadsheet Stock chart PBwiki Magic Equation HTML Recent Changes Recent Visitors Table of Contents # of visitors Chat Photos Bubbleshare Slide Video, including YouTube	Wikispaces applications (TOC, RSS, tag cloud, etc.) Video Audio Calendar Spreadsheet Document Polls RSS feds Chat and IM Slideshow Map Bookmark Other HTML
File Storage	Attachments: limit of 40, each no larger than 2 MB (80 MB)	10 MB for free account 1 GB for silver 2 GB for gold 5 GB for platinum	2 GB for free account 2 GB for plus 5 GB for super 40 GB for private label
Backup	HTML to a zip file	.zip	Windows .zip and Unix .tgz Backup and export as HTML
Additional Features	Discussion threads Individual profile pages Internal message system Templates What’s New Members To-Dos Invitation management	PBwiki 2.0 transition Invite key RSS and Atom feeds Notifications Traffic and statistics	Invitations Space badges Statistics Templates Recent Changes

I really like Wetpaint the best, primarily because of the following:

• automatically generated navigation bar
• social networking features
• easy-to-use editor
• widgets for the services I use (like SlideShare)

The primary disadvantage is the limited amount of file storage (attachments). However, that’s easily overcome by embedding or linking to Box.net folders.

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Also posted at 4R x T.