head to head · open source
gollum vs NoteDiscovery
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. NoteDiscovery has 2,807 stars, 233 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum leads on adoption by 410% (14,325 vs 2,807 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; NoteDiscovery is written in JavaScript under MIT. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, NoteDiscovery 8%. NoteDiscovery 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 | NoteDiscovery | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 233 |
| 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 NoteDiscovery if
- You want the NoteDiscovery feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and NoteDiscovery 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 NoteDiscovery
NoteDiscovery is a lightweight, self hosted note taking and knowledge base application, written in JavaScript and released under the MIT licence, that stores every note as a plain markdown file in folders on your own server and is aimed at privacy conscious individuals, developers, knowledge workers, and teams who want to own their data.
read the full NoteDiscovery overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or NoteDiscovery more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and NoteDiscovery has 2,807. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and NoteDiscovery free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and NoteDiscovery under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and NoteDiscovery?
gollum is written in Ruby and NoteDiscovery in JavaScript. 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 NoteDiscovery?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose NoteDiscovery if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.