head to head · open source
gollum vs persepolis
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. persepolis has 7,455 stars, 708 forks, 317 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. gollum leads on adoption by 92% (14,325 vs 7,455 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; persepolis is written in Python under GPL-3.0. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, persepolis 9%. gollum 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 | persepolis | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2025-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 708 |
| 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 persepolis if
- You want the persepolis feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and persepolis 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 persepolis
Persepolis is a download manager written in Python and released under the GPL 3.0 license. It ships a graphical interface built with PyQt5 or PySide6 and is developed for GNU/Linux distributions, the BSDs, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. The project has existed for roughly ten years, carries 7,449 stars and 709 forks on GitHub, and uses the Meson build system. It is packaged for Arch Linux through the persepolis git AUR package, and it belongs to the desktop application ecosystem of Python and Qt rather than to any single distribution.
read the full persepolis overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or persepolis more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and persepolis has 7,455. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and persepolis free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and persepolis under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and persepolis?
gollum is written in Ruby and persepolis 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 persepolis?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose persepolis if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.