head to head · open source
gollum vs schemaspy
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. schemaspy has 3,724 stars, 357 forks, 303 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. gollum leads on adoption by 285% (14,325 vs 3,724 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; schemaspy is written in HTML under LGPL-3.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, schemaspy 10%. schemaspy 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 | schemaspy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | HTML |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-03-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 357 |
| 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 schemaspy if
- You want the schemaspy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and schemaspy 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 schemaspy
SchemaSpy is a standalone Java based database metadata analyzer that reverse engineers an existing database schema and produces a browsable HTML report with entity relationship diagrams, for database administrators and developers who need to understand a data model they did not design.
read the full schemaspy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or schemaspy more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and schemaspy has 3,724. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and schemaspy free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and schemaspy under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and schemaspy?
gollum is written in Ruby and schemaspy in HTML. 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 schemaspy?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose schemaspy if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.