head to head · open source
gollum vs arscontexta
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. arscontexta has 3,492 stars, 226 forks, 35 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. gollum leads on adoption by 310% (14,325 vs 3,492 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; arscontexta is written in Shell under MIT. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, arscontexta 6%. arscontexta was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (markdown), 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
| gollum | arscontexta | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Shell |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-02-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 226 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gollum if
- You weight community size — 14K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick arscontexta if
- You want the arscontexta feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and arscontexta fits your workflow better
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 →
About arscontexta
Ars Contexta is an MIT licensed Claude Code plugin that turns a short conversation about how you think and work into a complete, individualized second brain made of plain markdown files you own.
read the full arscontexta overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or arscontexta more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and arscontexta has 3,492. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and arscontexta free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and arscontexta under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and arscontexta?
gollum is written in Ruby and arscontexta in Shell. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, gollum or arscontexta?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose arscontexta if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.