head to head · open source
gollum vs cheat
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. cheat has 13,461 stars, 853 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. gollum leads on adoption by 6% (14,325 vs 13,461 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; cheat is written in Go under MIT. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, cheat 6%. cheat 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.
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Side by side
| gollum | cheat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 13K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-05-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 853 |
| 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 cheat if
- You want the cheat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cheat 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 cheat
cheat is an MIT licensed, Go written command line tool for nix system administrators that creates and displays interactive cheatsheets, so that options for commands used frequently but not frequently enough to remember stay one command away.
read the full cheat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or cheat more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and cheat has 13,461. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and cheat free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and cheat under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and cheat?
gollum is written in Ruby and cheat in Go. 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 cheat?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cheat if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.