Foswiki is an enterprise wiki, typically used to run a collaboration platform,[5][6][7] knowledge base[8][9] or document management system.

Users can create wiki applications using the Topic Markup Language (TML), and developers can extend its functionality with plugins.

[14] Foswiki features an open architecture programmed and implemented in the Perl and JavaScript languages[4] and runs on standard web servers such as Apache, Nginx and lighttpd.

With almost 70 contributors providing over 56,000 commits since its inception,[15][16] the Foswiki team not only develops the code but also offers on-line support, including on IRC and Slack.

Extensions have been developed to link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, including single sign-on, track Extreme Programming projects, and others.

Foswiki (among other components) was used in several research programs including Data Integration Platform for Systems Biology Collaborations, an interactive data integration platform supporting collaborative research projects, based on Foswiki, Solr/Lucene, and custom helper applications.

[18] Informal user reports suggest that Foswiki scales reasonably well even though it uses plain text files and no relational database to store page data, especially where load balancing and caching are used to improve performance.