head to head · open source
Docs vs gollum
Docs has 16,829 GitHub stars, 634 forks, 370 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum has 14,327 stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. Docs leads on adoption by 17% (16,829 vs 14,327 stars). Docs is written in Python under MIT; gollum is written in Ruby under MIT. Docs has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, gollum 11%. Docs 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Docs | gollum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-11-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 634 | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Docs if
- You weight community size — 17K 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 Docs
Docs is an open source collaborative text editor for creating, editing, and sharing documents in real time. It lives in the open source documentation and knowledge base ecosystem, and it is built with Django and React for web native use. The repository describes Docs as a web native editor made for teams that need clean documents and sub documents without surrendering data to a hosted service.
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 →
More in Content & Publishing
Related comparisons
More Documentation & Knowledge Base projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Documentation & Knowledge Base field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Docs or gollum more popular?
Docs has 16,829 GitHub stars and gollum has 14,327. Docs has the larger community by that measure.
Are Docs and gollum free?
Both are open source. Docs is licensed under MIT and gollum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Docs and gollum?
Docs 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, Docs or gollum?
Choose Docs if you want the larger community (16,829 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gollum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.