head to head · open source
deepwiki-open vs gollum
deepwiki-open has 17,996 GitHub stars, 2,004 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. gollum has 14,327 stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. deepwiki-open leads on adoption by 26% (17,996 vs 14,327 stars). deepwiki-open is written in Python under MIT; gollum is written in Ruby under MIT. deepwiki-open has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, gollum 11%. deepwiki-open was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| deepwiki-open | gollum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-03 | 2025-11-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick deepwiki-open if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- 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 deepwiki-open
DeepWiki Open, also published as Grok Wiki, is an open source wiki generator for source code repositories. It takes a GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repository name as input and produces a navigable documentation site for that codebase. The project is written in Python and released under the MIT License, and the author describes it plainly as a personal implementation attempt at DeepWiki. It lives in the AI developer tooling ecosystem alongside the model providers and coding agents its topic list names, including OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, Codex, and grok cli.
read the full deepwiki-open 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 deepwiki-open or gollum more popular?
deepwiki-open has 17,996 GitHub stars and gollum has 14,327. deepwiki-open has the larger community by that measure.
Are deepwiki-open and gollum free?
Both are open source. deepwiki-open is licensed under MIT and gollum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between deepwiki-open and gollum?
deepwiki-open is written in Python 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, deepwiki-open or gollum?
Choose deepwiki-open if you want the larger community (17,996 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gollum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.