head to head · open source
gollum vs utopia
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. utopia has 9,245 stars, 1,035 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped today. gollum leads on adoption by 55% (14,325 vs 9,245 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; utopia is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, utopia 11%. utopia was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | utopia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 9.2K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 utopia if
- You want the utopia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and utopia 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 utopia
Utopia is the world's first open source enterprise world model: a self hosted knowledge substrate with a bitemporal graph and an ontology at its base layer, built by DeepLethe for teams that need agent memory, governed knowledge, and a trustworthy decision core running on hardware they control.
read the full utopia overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or utopia more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and utopia has 9,245. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and utopia free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and utopia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and utopia?
gollum is written in Ruby and utopia in Rust. 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 utopia?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose utopia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.