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Hugo vs Publii: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Hugo and Publii are both popular static site generators that help create fast and efficient websites. While they share similar goals, there are significant differences between the two.

  1. Ease of Use: Publii is designed to be beginner-friendly with a user-friendly interface and intuitive controls. It simplifies the process of creating a website by providing a visual editor, making it easy for non-technical users to manage their site. On the other hand, Hugo requires some technical knowledge and familiarity with the command-line interface, making it more suitable for developers and advanced users.

  2. Flexibility: Hugo offers more flexibility in terms of customization and extensibility. It provides a wide range of themes and templates that can be easily modified or created from scratch to match specific design requirements. Publii, while having its own set of themes and templates, offers limited customization options and is generally better suited for simpler websites or blogs.

  3. Performance: Hugo is known for its outstanding performance and speed. It generates websites quickly, even with a large number of pages, making it ideal for websites that require frequent updates or content changes. Publii, while still fast, may not be as efficient as Hugo when it comes to generating large websites.

  4. Deployment: Hugo generates static websites that can be deployed easily using any web server. This makes it versatile and compatible with different hosting environments. Publii, on the other hand, has a built-in deployment feature, allowing users to publish their websites directly to popular hosting providers such as Amazon S3, GitHub Pages, and Netlify. This makes it more convenient for users who want a streamlined deployment process.

  5. Plugin Ecosystem: Hugo has a large and active community that contributes to an extensive plugin ecosystem. These plugins add additional functionality and features to Hugo, allowing users to extend its capabilities. Publii, while supporting plugins, has a more limited selection and a smaller developer community focused primarily on the core functionalities of the platform.

  6. Support and Documentation: Hugo has comprehensive documentation, a dedicated forum, and a constantly growing community that provides support and assistance. This makes it easier for users to find help and resources when facing issues or seeking guidance. Publii also provides documentation and a user support forum, but the community and resources available may be relatively smaller compared to Hugo.

In summary, Hugo is a powerful and flexible static site generator suitable for developers and users seeking extensive customization options, while Publii offers a more user-friendly interface and convenient deployment features, making it ideal for beginners or users looking for a streamlined website creation process.

Decisions about Hugo and Publii
Manuel Feller
Frontend Engineer at BI X · | 4 upvotes · 169.1K 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 Publii
  • 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
  • 2
    Fast load pages
  • 1
    Easy to use

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Cons of Hugo
Cons of Publii
  • 4
    No Plugins/Extensions
  • 2
    Template syntax not friendly
  • 1
    Quick builds
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    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 Publii?

    Free, Open-Source Static Website CMS for Windows and MacOS

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    What companies use Hugo?
    What companies use Publii?
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      What tools integrate with Hugo?
      What tools integrate with Publii?

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      Blog Posts

      What are some alternatives to Hugo and Publii?
      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.
      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.
      See all alternatives