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Jekyll vs Pelican: What are the differences?
Jekyll: Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby. 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; Pelican: A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic. 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.
Jekyll and Pelican belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Jekyll are:
- Simple - No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content.
- Static - Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
- Blog-aware - Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.
On the other hand, Pelican provides the following key features:
- Blog articles and pages
- Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.)
- Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates)
"Github pages integration" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Jekyll, while over 6 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Pelican.
Jekyll and Pelican are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38K GitHub stars and 8.28K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Pelican with 8.85K GitHub stars and 1.58K GitHub forks.
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.
Pros of Jekyll
- Github pages integration75
- Open source54
- It's slick, customisable and hackerish37
- Easy to deploy24
- Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset23
- Gitlab pages integration7
- Best for blogging5
- Low maintenance2
- Easy to integrate localization2
- Huge plugins ecosystem1
- Authoring freedom and simplicity1
Pros of Pelican
- Open source7
- Jinja26
- Implemented in Python4
- Easy to deploy4
- Plugability3
- RestructuredText and Markdown support2
- Easy to customize1
- Can run on Github pages1
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Cons of Jekyll
- Build time increases exponentially as site grows4
- Lack of developments lately2
- Og doesn't work with postings dynamically1