head to head · open source
wiki vs yard
wiki has 28,938 GitHub stars, 3,314 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped today. yard has 2,010 stars, 434 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. wiki leads on adoption by 1,340% (28,938 vs 2,010 stars). wiki is written in Vue under AGPL-3.0; yard is written in Ruby under MIT. wiki has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, yard 22%. wiki was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (documentation), 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 | yard | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Vue | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 434 |
| 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 yard if
- You want the yard feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and yard 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 yard
YARD: Yay! A Ruby Documentation Tool Synopsis YARD is a documentation generation tool for the Ruby programming language. It enables the user to generate consistent, usable documentation that can be exported to a number of formats very easily, and also supports extending for custom Ruby constructs such as custom class level definitions. Below is a summary of some of YARD's notable features. Feature List 1. Builtin RDoc/Markdown Hybrid Support : YARD ships with a builtin markup renderer that supports both RDoc and Markdown formatting out of the box—no external gem required. You can freely mix RDoc style and Markdow…
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Frequently asked questions
Is wiki or yard more popular?
wiki has 28,938 GitHub stars and yard has 2,010. wiki has the larger community by that measure.
Are wiki and yard free?
Both are open source. wiki is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and yard under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between wiki and yard?
wiki is written in Vue and yard 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 yard?
Choose wiki if you want the larger community (28,938 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose yard if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.