head to head · open source
calibre vs papermill
calibre has 26,327 GitHub stars, 2,743 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. papermill has 6,498 stars, 465 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 29 days ago. calibre leads on adoption by 305% (26,327 vs 6,498 stars). calibre is written in Python under GPL-3.0; papermill is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. calibre has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, papermill 7%. calibre was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (python), 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
| calibre | papermill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 465 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick calibre if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick papermill if
- You want the papermill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and papermill fits your workflow better
About calibre
calibre calibre is an e book manager. It can view, convert, edit and catalog e books in all of the major e book formats. It can also talk to e book reader devices. It can go out to the internet and fetch metadata for your books. It can download newspapers and convert them into e books for convenient reading. It is cross platform, running on Linux, Windows and macOS. For more information, see the calibre About page. Screenshots Screenshots page Usage See the User Manual. Development Setting up a development environment for calibre. A tarball of the source code for the current calibre release. Bugs Bug reports and…
read the full calibre overview →
About papermill
papermill is a tool for parameterizing, executing, and analyzing Jupyter Notebooks. Papermill lets you: parameterize notebooks execute notebooks This opens up new opportunities for how notebooks can be used. For example: Perhaps you have a financial report that you wish to run with different values on the first or last day of a month or at the beginning or end of the year, using parameters makes this task easier. Do you want to run a notebook and depending on its results, choose a particular notebook to run next? You can now programmatically execute a workflow without having to copy and paste from notebook to…
read the full papermill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is calibre or papermill more popular?
calibre has 26,327 GitHub stars and papermill has 6,498. calibre has the larger community by that measure.
Are calibre and papermill free?
Both are open source. calibre is licensed under GPL-3.0 and papermill under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between calibre and papermill?
calibre is written in Python and papermill in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, calibre or papermill?
Choose calibre if you want the larger community (26,327 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose papermill if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.