head to head · open source
gollum vs liam
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. liam has 5,116 stars, 239 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum leads on adoption by 180% (14,325 vs 5,116 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; liam is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, liam 5%. liam was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (documentation, documentation-tool), 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 | liam | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 239 |
| 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 liam if
- You want the liam feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and liam 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 liam
Liam is an open source TypeScript tool that automatically generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from an existing database schema, built for developers and teams who need to read, document, and share the structure of a database without drawing diagrams by hand.
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or liam more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and liam has 5,116. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and liam free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and liam under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and liam?
gollum is written in Ruby and liam in TypeScript. 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 liam?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose liam if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.