head to head · open source
gollum vs wandao
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. wandao has 1,160 stars, 136 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum leads on adoption by 1,135% (14,325 vs 1,160 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; wandao is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, wandao 12%. wandao 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 | wandao | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 136 |
| 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 wandao if
- You want the wandao feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and wandao 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 wandao
Wandao (万能导) is a multi platform knowledge base Markdown import and export tool that turns content you have permission to access into local Markdown and pushes local Markdown back into supported platforms, built for people who need to back up, migrate, or study documentation without manual copying and pasting.
read the full wandao overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or wandao more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and wandao has 1,160. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and wandao free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and wandao under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and wandao?
gollum is written in Ruby and wandao 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 wandao?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose wandao if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.