head to head · open source
gollum vs readme-ai
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. readme-ai has 2,988 stars, 296 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. gollum leads on adoption by 379% (14,325 vs 2,988 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; readme-ai is written in Python under MIT. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, readme-ai 10%. readme-ai 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 | readme-ai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 296 |
| 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 readme-ai if
- You want the readme-ai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and readme-ai 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 readme-ai
ReadmeAI is a Python command line tool that automatically generates README files for a codebase by pairing a repository processing engine with large language models, and it is built for developers and maintainers who want structured project documentation without writing it by hand.
read the full readme-ai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or readme-ai more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and readme-ai has 2,988. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and readme-ai free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and readme-ai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and readme-ai?
gollum is written in Ruby and readme-ai in Python. 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 readme-ai?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose readme-ai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.