What is Gollum used for?

Gollum is a simple wiki built on Git, storing pages as editable text files and offering a local web editor and many markup formats. It is a good fit for developer documentation kept alongside code and editing GitHub wikis locally.

Is Gollum open source?

Yes. Gollum is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at gollum/gollum and is written mainly in Ruby.

Yes. Gollum is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Gollum?

Yes. Gollum can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Gollum an alternative to?

Gollum is an open-source alternative to Confluence and GitBook. Other open-source alternatives to Confluence include Wiki.js, MrDoc and Raneto.

Is Gollum actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Gollum was on 24 November 2025, and the latest release is v6.1.0, published on 23 December 2024. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.

Gollum: open-source alternative to Confluence, GitBook

About Gollum

Gollum is a wiki system built on top of Git. A Gollum wiki is simply a Git repository of text or markup files that humans can edit, organized into directories however you like, and it can also hold images, PDFs and page headers and footers. Pages can be written in a variety of markups and edited with your own editor or with the built-in web interface.

Because it is Git, every page keeps its history, can be displayed in all versions and can be reverted. Gollum aims to stay compatible with GitHub and GitLab wikis, so you can clone one of those wikis and view or edit it locally. Advanced features include diagrams with Mermaid or PlantUML, BibTeX and citation support, annotations with CriticMarkup, mathematics via KaTeX or MathJax, macros, redirects and an RSS feed of recent changes.

It is written in Ruby and released under the MIT license. It runs on Unix-like systems and Windows using either standard Ruby or JRuby, though on Windows only JRuby is supported. You can install it as a Ruby gem, run it with Docker or deploy it as a Java web application resource. It also supports Rack, authentication servers and running as a service.

Key features

Wiki stored as a Git repository
Built-in web editor and local file editing
Compatible with GitHub and GitLab wikis
Mermaid and PlantUML diagrams
Math with KaTeX or MathJax
Page redirects and macros
RSS feed of recent changes

Good fit for

→Developer documentation kept alongside code
→Editing GitHub wikis locally

Built with: Ruby
Tags: wiki; git; documentation; markdown; ruby; self-hosted; knowledge-base; docker

Gollum: questions and answers

What is Gollum used for?: Gollum is a simple wiki built on Git, storing pages as editable text files and offering a local web editor and many markup formats. It is a good fit for developer documentation kept alongside code and editing GitHub wikis locally.
Is Gollum open source?: Yes. Gollum is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at gollum/gollum and is written mainly in Ruby.
Is Gollum free?: Yes. Gollum is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Gollum?: Yes. Gollum can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Gollum an alternative to?: Gollum is an open-source alternative to Confluence and GitBook. Other open-source alternatives to Confluence include Wiki.js, MrDoc and Raneto.
Is Gollum actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Gollum was on 24 November 2025, and the latest release is v6.1.0, published on 23 December 2024. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.