Alternatives to Hugo logo

Alternatives to Hugo

Jekyll, Hexo, WordPress, MkDocs, and Pelican are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Hugo.
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What is Hugo and what are its top alternatives?

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.
Hugo is a tool in the Static Site Generators category of a tech stack.
Hugo is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Hugo's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Hugo

  • Jekyll
    Jekyll

    Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories. ...

  • Hexo
    Hexo

    Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds. ...

  • WordPress
    WordPress

    The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family. ...

  • MkDocs
    MkDocs

    It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes. ...

  • Pelican
    Pelican

    Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown. ...

  • Gatsby
    Gatsby

    Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future. ...

  • VuePress
    VuePress

    A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects. ...

  • Middleman
    Middleman

    Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment. ...

Hugo alternatives & related posts

Jekyll logo

Jekyll

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Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby
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PROS OF JEKYLL
  • 74
    Github pages integration
  • 54
    Open source
  • 37
    It's slick, customisable and hackerish
  • 24
    Easy to deploy
  • 23
    Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
  • 7
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 5
    Best for blogging
  • 2
    Low maintenance
  • 2
    Easy to integrate localization
  • 1
    Huge plugins ecosystem
  • 1
    Authoring freedom and simplicity
CONS OF JEKYLL
  • 4
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows
  • 2
    Lack of developments lately
  • 1
    Og doesn't work with postings dynamically

related Jekyll posts

Dale Ross
Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

See more
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 490.2K views
Shared insights
on
JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

See more
Hexo logo

Hexo

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A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js
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PROS OF HEXO
  • 18
    Ease of deployment
  • 13
    Uses NodeJS and npm
  • 12
    Easy GitHub Pages publishing
  • 10
    Powerful templating
  • 7
    Useful tools and plugins
  • 4
    Easy intergrating with js
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Blazing Fast
CONS OF HEXO
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Hexo posts

    WordPress logo

    WordPress

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    A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
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    PROS OF WORDPRESS
    • 415
      Customizable
    • 366
      Easy to manage
    • 354
      Plugins & themes
    • 258
      Non-tech colleagues can update website content
    • 247
      Really powerful
    • 145
      Rapid website development
    • 78
      Best documentation
    • 51
      Codex
    • 44
      Product feature set
    • 35
      Custom/internal social network
    • 18
      Open source
    • 8
      Great for all types of websites
    • 7
      Huge install and user base
    • 5
      Perfect example of user collaboration
    • 5
      Open Source Community
    • 5
      Most websites make use of it
    • 5
      It's simple and easy to use by any novice
    • 5
      Best
    • 5
      I like it like I like a kick in the groin
    • 4
      Community
    • 4
      API-based CMS
    • 3
      Easy To use
    • 2
      <a href="https://secure.wphackedhel">Easy Beginner</a>
    CONS OF WORDPRESS
    • 13
      Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
    • 13
      Plugins are of mixed quality
    • 10
      Not best backend UI
    • 2
      Complex Organization
    • 1
      Do not cover all the basics in the core
    • 1
      Great Security

    related WordPress posts

    Dale Ross
    Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

    I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

    I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

    Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

    See more
    Siddhant Sharma
    Tech Connoisseur at Channelize.io · | 12 upvotes · 1.1M views

    WordPress Magento PHP Java Swift JavaScript

    Back in the days, we started looking for a date on different matrimonial websites as there were no Dating Applications. We used to create different profiles. It all changed in 2012 when Tinder, an Online Dating application came into India Market.

    Tinder allowed us to communicate with our potential soul mates. That too without paying any extra money. I too got 4-6 matches in 6 years. It changed the life of many Millennials. Tinder created a revolution of its own. P.S. - I still don't have a date :(

    Posting my first article. Please have a look and do give feedback.

    Communication InAppChat Dating Matrimonial #messaging

    See more
    MkDocs logo

    MkDocs

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    A static site generator
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    PROS OF MKDOCS
    • 5
      Speed
    • 4
      Gitlab integration
    • 3
      Extensibility
    • 2
      Themes
    CONS OF MKDOCS
    • 1
      Build time increases exponentially as site grows

    related MkDocs posts

    Nikolaj Ivancic

    I want to build a documentation tool - functionally equivalent to MkDocs. The initial choice ought to be VuePress - but I know of at least one respectable developer who started with VuePress and switched to Nuxt.js. A rich set of "themes" is a plus and all documents ought to be in Markdown.

    Any opinions?

    See more
    Pelican logo

    Pelican

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    A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic
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    PROS OF PELICAN
    • 7
      Open source
    • 6
      Jinja2
    • 4
      Implemented in Python
    • 4
      Easy to deploy
    • 3
      Plugability
    • 2
      RestructuredText and Markdown support
    • 1
      Easy to customize
    • 1
      Can run on Github pages
    CONS OF PELICAN
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Pelican posts

      Gatsby logo

      Gatsby

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      Free, open source framework for building blazing fast websites and apps with React
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      PROS OF GATSBY
      • 28
        Generated websites are super fast
      • 16
        Fast
      • 15
        GraphQL
      • 10
        Progressive Web Apps generation
      • 9
        Easy to connect with lots of CMS via official plugins
      • 9
        Reusable components (React)
      • 7
        Allows to use markdown files as articles
      • 5
        Static-sites
      • 5
        All the benefits of a static website + React+GraphQL
      • 5
        Images
      • 4
        List of starters as base for new project
      • 3
        Easy to connect with Drupal via official plugin
      • 3
        Open source
      • 1
        Gitlab pages integration
      • 1
        Incremental Build
      CONS OF GATSBY
      • 6
        No ssr
      • 3
        Very slow builds
      • 3
        Documentation isn't complete.
      • 2
        For-profit
      • 2
        Slow builds
      • 2
        Flash of unstyled content issues
      • 1
        Problematic between develop and build commands
      • 1
        Difficult debugging
      • 1
        Too many dependencies
      • 1
        Plugin driven development
      • 1
        Difficult maintenance

      related Gatsby posts

      Johnny Bell

      I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

      I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

      I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

      Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

      Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

      With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

      If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

      See more
      Ronan Levesque
      Software engineer at Algolia · | 18 upvotes · 338.7K views

      A few months ago we decided to move our whole static website (www.algolia.com) to a new stack. At the time we were using a website generator called Middleman, written in Ruby. As a team of only front-end developers we didn't feel very comfortable with the language itself, and the time it took to build was not satisfying. We decided to move to Gatsby to take advantage of its use of React , as well as its incredibly high performances in terms of build and page rendering.

      See more
      VuePress logo

      VuePress

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      A static-site generator built by the Vue.js team
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      PROS OF VUEPRESS
      • 4
        It's Vue
      • 2
        Created by the vue.js developers
      • 2
        Built in text search feature
      CONS OF VUEPRESS
      • 3
        Its Vue

      related VuePress posts

      Nikolaj Ivancic

      I want to build a documentation tool - functionally equivalent to MkDocs. The initial choice ought to be VuePress - but I know of at least one respectable developer who started with VuePress and switched to Nuxt.js. A rich set of "themes" is a plus and all documents ought to be in Markdown.

      Any opinions?

      See more
      Middleman logo

      Middleman

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      A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development
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      PROS OF MIDDLEMAN
      • 20
        Rails for static sites
      • 18
        Erb, haml, slim
      • 17
        Live reload
      • 7
        Easy setup
      • 3
        Emacs org-mode integration by middleman-org
      • 1
        Make front-end easy and rock solid again
      CONS OF MIDDLEMAN
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Middleman posts

        Ronan Levesque
        Software engineer at Algolia · | 18 upvotes · 338.7K views

        A few months ago we decided to move our whole static website (www.algolia.com) to a new stack. At the time we were using a website generator called Middleman, written in Ruby. As a team of only front-end developers we didn't feel very comfortable with the language itself, and the time it took to build was not satisfying. We decided to move to Gatsby to take advantage of its use of React , as well as its incredibly high performances in terms of build and page rendering.

        See more