head to head · open source
gollum vs Typemill
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. Typemill has 619 stars, 76 forks, 52 open issues and last shipped 27 days ago. gollum leads on adoption by 2,214% (14,325 vs 619 stars). gollum is written in Ruby under MIT; Typemill is written in JavaScript under MIT. gollum has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, Typemill 12%. Typemill was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (documentation, documentation-tool, 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 | Typemill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 619 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2025-11-24 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 76 |
| 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 Typemill if
- You want the Typemill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and Typemill 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 Typemill
Typemill is an open source, MIT licensed flat file content management system that stores every page as a Markdown file and is built for authors and teams publishing informational sites such as documentation, manuals, handbooks, knowledge bases, and wikis.
read the full Typemill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gollum or Typemill more popular?
gollum has 14,325 GitHub stars and Typemill has 619. gollum has the larger community by that measure.
Are gollum and Typemill free?
Both are open source. gollum is licensed under MIT and Typemill under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gollum and Typemill?
gollum is written in Ruby and Typemill in JavaScript. 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 Typemill?
Choose gollum if you want the larger community (14,325 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Typemill if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.