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Hugo vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Introduction

Hugo and Pelican are both static site generators used to build websites. They differ in certain aspects, which are outlined below.

  1. Development Language: Hugo is developed in Go, while Pelican is developed in Python. This means that developers who are more proficient in one language than the other may prefer one over the other. Additionally, the availability of plugins and community support can vary based on the popularity of the language.
  2. Performance and Speed: Hugo is known for its speed and performance. It uses a single executable file written in Go, enabling it to process and build websites quickly, even with a large number of pages. On the other hand, Pelican may be slower when dealing with larger websites or sites with complex features due to its reliance on Python and its dependencies.
  3. Customization and Themes: Both Hugo and Pelican offer a range of themes and templates to choose from. However, Hugo provides more customization options out of the box, with a wider selection of pre-built themes. It also has a powerful templating language that allows for easy customization and flexibility. Pelican, on the other hand, may require more manual configuration and coding to achieve similar levels of customization.
  4. Content Organization: Hugo organizes content using a section and page hierarchy, allowing for easy categorization and navigation. This makes it suitable for larger websites with complex content structures. Pelican, on the other hand, organizes content using a category, tags, and articles structure, which may be more suitable for smaller websites or personal blogs with simpler content organization needs.
  5. Plugin Ecosystem: Hugo has a growing and active plugin ecosystem, with a wide range of community-developed plugins available for extending its functionality. On the other hand, Pelican has a smaller plugin ecosystem, with fewer available plugins. This may limit the extensibility and flexibility of Pelican compared to Hugo in certain cases.
  6. Community and Documentation: Both Hugo and Pelican have active communities and provide comprehensive documentation. However, Hugo has gained popularity more recently and has a larger user community, which may result in more extensive community support and resources available online.

In Summary, Hugo and Pelican differ in their development language, performance, customization options, content organization, plugin ecosystem, and community support.

Advice on Hugo and Pelican
Needs advice
on
GatsbyGatsbyHugoHugo
and
Next.jsNext.js
in

Hi everyone, I'm trying to decide which front-end tool, that will likely use server-side rendering (SSR), in hopes it'll be faster. The end-user will upload a document and they see text output on their screen (like SaaS or microservice). I read that Gatsby can also do SSR. Also want to add a headless CMS that is easy to use.

Backend is in Go. Open to ideas. Thank you.

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Replies (2)
Vishal Gupta
Senior Architect at Mindtree Ltd · | 3 upvotes · 26.6K views
Recommends
on
GatsbyGatsbyNext.jsNext.js

If your purpose is plain simply to upload a file which can handle by backend service than Gatsby is good enough assuming you have other content pages which will benefit from faster page loads for those Headless CMS driven pages. But if you have more logical/functional aspects like deciding content/personalization at server side of web application than choose NextJS.

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Leonard Daume
CTO - Doing the right things right at QYRAGY GmbH · | 2 upvotes · 5.1K views
Recommends
on
AstroAstroNext.jsNext.js

I have experience with Hugo and Next.js, but not with Gatsby. I would go with Next.js. However, I used Astro for my last project, so I would recommend Astro. Astro is much faster and you can use almost any frontend framework if you need to.

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Decisions about Hugo and Pelican
Manuel Feller
Frontend Engineer at BI X · | 4 upvotes · 161.4K views

As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML or Markdown (what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.

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Pros of Hugo
Pros of Pelican
  • 47
    Lightning fast
  • 29
    Single Executable
  • 26
    Easy setup
  • 24
    Great development community
  • 23
    Open source
  • 13
    Write in golang
  • 8
    Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
  • 8
    Hacker mindset
  • 7
    LiveReload built in
  • 4
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 4
    Easy to customize themes
  • 4
    Very fast builds
  • 3
    Well documented
  • 3
    Fast builds
  • 3
    Easy to learn
  • 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

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Cons of Hugo
Cons of Pelican
  • 4
    No Plugins/Extensions
  • 2
    Template syntax not friendly
  • 1
    Quick builds
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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Hugo?

    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.

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Hugo?
    What companies use Pelican?
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    What are some alternatives to Hugo and Pelican?
    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 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
    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
    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.
    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.
    See all alternatives