head to head · open source
gollum vs nb
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. nb has 8,405 stars, 254 forks, 153 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. gollum leads on adoption by 70% (14,325 vs 8,405 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; nb is written in Shell under AGPL-3.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, nb 3%. nb 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 | nb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 8.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Shell |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-08-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 254 |
| 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 nb if
- You want the nb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and nb 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 nb
nb is a command line and local web note taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application distributed as a single portable shell script, aimed at people who want plain text notes, Git backed history, and local search without a hosted service.
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or nb more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and nb has 8,405. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and nb free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and nb under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and nb?
gollum is written in Ruby and nb in Shell. 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 nb?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nb if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.