head to head · open source
wiki vs gollum
wiki has 28,937 GitHub stars, 3,314 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gollum has 14,327 stars, 1,560 forks, 91 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. wiki leads on adoption by 102% (28,937 vs 14,327 stars). wiki is written in Vue under AGPL-3.0; gollum is written in Ruby under MIT. wiki has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, gollum 11%. wiki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (documentation, markdown, wiki), 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
| wiki | gollum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Vue | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-11-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick wiki if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Vue
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gollum if
- You want the gollum feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and gollum fits your workflow better
About wiki
Wiki.js is a modern, lightweight wiki application built on NodeJS and distributed as open source under the AGPL 3.0 licence, aimed at teams and organisations that want to publish and maintain their own documentation and knowledge base rather than renting a hosted one.
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is wiki or gollum more popular?
wiki has 28,937 GitHub stars and gollum has 14,327. wiki has the larger community by that measure.
Are wiki and gollum free?
Both are open source. wiki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and gollum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between wiki and gollum?
wiki is written in Vue and gollum in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, wiki or gollum?
Choose wiki if you want the larger community (28,937 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose gollum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.