head to head · open source
BookStack vs cheat
BookStack has 19,048 GitHub stars, 2,422 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cheat has 13,456 stars, 853 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. BookStack leads on adoption by 42% (19,048 vs 13,456 stars). BookStack is written in PHP under MIT; cheat is written in Go under MIT. BookStack has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, cheat 6%. BookStack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (documentation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| BookStack | cheat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 19K | ★ 13K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-05-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 853 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick BookStack if
- You weight community size — 19K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cheat if
- You want the cheat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cheat fits your workflow better
About BookStack
BookStack is a self hosted documentation platform written in PHP on top of the Laravel framework, released under the MIT license. It is described by its maintainers as an opinionated platform for storing and organising information and documentation, and it is distributed as an open source project whose development is now managed on Codeberg. The project has existed for roughly eleven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than nineteen thousand stars and over two thousand forks recorded against its repository history.
read the full BookStack overview →
About cheat
cheat is an MIT licensed, Go written command line tool for nix system administrators that creates and displays interactive cheatsheets, so that options for commands used frequently but not frequently enough to remember stay one command away.
read the full cheat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is BookStack or cheat more popular?
BookStack has 19,048 GitHub stars and cheat has 13,456. BookStack has the larger community by that measure.
Are BookStack and cheat free?
Both are open source. BookStack is licensed under MIT and cheat under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between BookStack and cheat?
BookStack is written in PHP and cheat in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, BookStack or cheat?
Choose BookStack if you want the larger community (19,048 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cheat if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.