head to head · open source
BookStack vs gollum
BookStack has 19,048 GitHub stars, 2,422 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum has 14,327 stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. BookStack leads on adoption by 33% (19,048 vs 14,327 stars). BookStack is written in PHP under MIT; gollum is written in Ruby under MIT. BookStack has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, gollum 11%. BookStack was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (documentation, wiki), 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 | gollum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 19K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-11-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 gollum if
- You want the gollum feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and gollum 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 gollum
Gollum is a simple wiki system built on top of Git. A Gollum wiki is simply a Git repository of a specific nature: its contents are human editable text or markup files, pages may be organized into directories in any way the author chooses, and other content such as images, PDFs, and headers or footers for pages can also be included. Pages may be written in a variety of markups, edited either with a favourite editor (changes become visible after committing) or through the built in web interface, and displayed in all versions or reverted. The project lives in the Ruby ecosystem, is distributed under the MIT license…
read the full gollum overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is BookStack or gollum more popular?
BookStack has 19,048 GitHub stars and gollum has 14,327. BookStack has the larger community by that measure.
Are BookStack and gollum free?
Both are open source. BookStack is licensed under MIT and gollum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between BookStack and gollum?
BookStack is written in PHP and gollum in Ruby. 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 gollum?
Choose BookStack if you want the larger community (19,048 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gollum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.