head to head · open source
calibre-web vs papermill
calibre-web has 18,216 GitHub stars, 1,863 forks, 409 open issues and last shipped yesterday. papermill has 6,485 stars, 462 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. calibre-web leads on adoption by 181% (18,216 vs 6,485 stars). calibre-web is written in Fluent under GPL-3.0; papermill is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. calibre-web has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, papermill 7%. calibre-web was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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-web | papermill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Fluent | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-07-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 462 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick calibre-web if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Fluent
- 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-web
Calibre Web is a web application that provides a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks from a valid Calibre database. It is a fork of the library project (calibreserver) and is licensed under the GPL v3. The project lives in the Calibre ecosystem, and it is distributed through PyPI as the calibreweb package as well as through Docker images. It has been developed for over eleven years and carries roughly 18,183 stars and 1,856 forks on GitHub.
read the full calibre-web overview →
About papermill
Papermill is a Python tool published under the BSD 3 Clause licence by the nteract project that parameterizes, executes, and analyzes Jupyter notebooks, and it is aimed at teams who need to run the same notebook repeatedly with different inputs inside data pipelines.
read the full papermill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is calibre-web or papermill more popular?
calibre-web has 18,216 GitHub stars and papermill has 6,485. calibre-web has the larger community by that measure.
Are calibre-web and papermill free?
Both are open source. calibre-web is licensed under GPL-3.0 and papermill under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between calibre-web and papermill?
calibre-web is written in Fluent 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-web or papermill?
Choose calibre-web if you want the larger community (18,216 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.