Overview
Gollum is a wiki system built on top of a Git repository, treating every wiki page as a plain-text file (Markdown, AsciiDoc, Org-mode, and others) tracked by Git. It provides a lightweight web frontend for browsing, searching, and editing pages without needing to know Git. Because the wiki is a plain Git repo, you get full version history, branching, and the ability to edit locally with any text editor. It runs as a Ruby process and is easy to launch with a single command pointing at a repository directory.
Where it falls short of Notion
- No real-time collaboration; concurrent edits require Git merge conflict resolution.
- Access control is all-or-nothing unless fronted by a reverse proxy with auth.
- No rich media embeds, databases, or kanban views that modern note tools offer.
- Search is basic file-content grep; no full-text index for large wikis.
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
Tags
Claim this listing to keep it accurate, add a deploy template, or feature it on relevant pages.
Embed the Gollum difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.
[](https://openreplace.com/gollum)Similar open-source projects
Other self-hostable tools in the same space worth comparing.
Open-source Notion alternative built on Flutter and Rust
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs
Privacy-first, local-first workspace combining docs, whiteboards, and databases
Lightweight, self-hosted note-taking and memo hub