Fictioneer or Kiption for your fiction archive

Fictioneer is a WordPress theme for publishing fiction. Kiption is a standalone fiction archive: one SQLite file, no plugins, no build step. Both are open source and free. Here is the honest comparison.

Setup and upkeep. Fictioneer needs WordPress, MySQL, and a careful plugin stack; its own docs call it hard for newcomers and warn that popular caching plugins break it. Because it ships outside the official directory, every update is a manual theme upload. Kiption installs as one directory, and updates are versioned releases you can stage and roll back.

Getting your archive in. Fictioneer has no export tool. Its migration guide asks you to paste PHP into functions.php, warns you to delete the script afterward because leaving it deployed is a security hole, and gives no path in from other software at all. Kiption imports the standard WordPress export file with one command: stories, chapters, author notes, genres, fandoms, characters, comments, collections, and recommendations come across. A dry-run report counts everything first, and a database snapshot is taken before any of it commits. Old /story/ and /chapter/ links keep working through a 301 map, so your search rankings move with you.

Reader engagement. Fictioneer refuses ratings and review scores on purpose; three separate request threads were closed wontfix. Kiption ships zero-to-ten reviews with author responses, kudos, favorites, follows with email digests, and reading lists. Reader email notifications, which Fictioneer declines to build, are built in.

Counts you can trust. Fictioneer caches hard: its author index can run 24 hours stale, and its follow counters drift, a bug its author tracks but does not plan to fix. Kiption renders every page with at most one database query and keeps the numbers exact.

Your data stays yours. Chapters are markdown at rest, not WordPress HTML. Any work downloads as EPUB or HTML whenever a reader or the author wants it. Nothing about leaving Kiption needs a plugin.

Minimums, not adjectives: Kiption needs PHP 8.3 and a SQLite file. Fictioneer needs at least WordPress 6.5, PHP 7.4, and MySQL, plus the hosting headroom its own FAQ says large archives require.

On Kiption Cloud, updates, backups, and security are our job: start your archive.