head to head · open source
gollum vs nebula
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. nebula has 12,398 stars, 1,329 forks, 678 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. gollum leads on adoption by 16% (14,325 vs 12,398 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; nebula is written in C++ under Apache-2.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, nebula 11%. nebula 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 | nebula | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | C++ |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 nebula if
- You want the nebula feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and nebula 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 nebula
NebulaGraph is an open source, distributed graph database written in C++ and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the graph database ecosystem and appears in the CNCF Database Landscape. The project describes itself as symmetrically distributed, with storage and computing separated into distinct layers, horizontal scalability across nodes, strong data consistency enforced through the RAFT protocol, an OpenCypher compatible query language, role based access control, and a set of graph analytics algorithms. It has been developed for roughly eight years and carries 12,387 stars, 1,330 forks, and 678 op…
read the full nebula overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or nebula more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and nebula has 12,398. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and nebula free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and nebula under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and nebula?
gollum is written in Ruby and nebula in C++. 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 nebula?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nebula if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.