Gollum vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Simple Git-backed wiki with Markdown support and a local web frontend | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 14k | 81k |
| Language | Ruby | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 6 months ago | today |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Gollum
- 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.
Stirling-PDF
- Not a document-management or collaboration tool — purely a PDF processing utility.
- Advanced features like user auth and SSO require the paid Stirling-PDF Pro license.
- No document storage or versioning; files must be uploaded and downloaded manually each session.
- OCR accuracy depends on Tesseract language packs installed in the container.
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Stirling-PDF has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs