head to head · open source
wiki vs md-to-pdf
wiki has 28,938 GitHub stars, 3,314 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped today. md-to-pdf has 1,952 stars, 161 forks, 47 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. wiki leads on adoption by 1,382% (28,938 vs 1,952 stars). wiki is written in Vue under AGPL-3.0; md-to-pdf is written in TypeScript under MIT. wiki has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, md-to-pdf 8%. wiki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (documentation, 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| wiki | md-to-pdf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Vue | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2025-12-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 161 |
| 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 md-to-pdf if
- You want the md-to-pdf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and md-to-pdf 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 md-to-pdf
Markdown to PDF A simple and hackable CLI tool for converting markdown to pdf . It uses Marked to convert markdown to html and Puppeteer (headless Chromium) to further convert the html to pdf . It also uses highlight.js for code highlighting. The whole source code of this tool is only \ 250 lines of JS 500 lines of Typescript and 100 lines of CSS, so it is easy to clone and customize. Highlights: Concurrently convert multiple Markdown files Watch mode Use your own or remote stylesheets/scripts Front matter for configuration Headers and Footers Page Breaks Syntax highlighting in code blocks Extend the options of t…
read the full md-to-pdf overview →
More in Content & Publishing
Related comparisons
More Documentation & Knowledge Base projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Documentation & Knowledge Base field.
Frequently asked questions
Is wiki or md-to-pdf more popular?
wiki has 28,938 GitHub stars and md-to-pdf has 1,952. wiki has the larger community by that measure.
Are wiki and md-to-pdf free?
Both are open source. wiki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and md-to-pdf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between wiki and md-to-pdf?
wiki is written in Vue and md-to-pdf in TypeScript. 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 md-to-pdf?
Choose wiki if you want the larger community (28,938 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose md-to-pdf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.