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Jekyll vs Sphinx: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Sphinx? Open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and integration simplicity in mind. Sphinx lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with Sphinx pretty much as with a database server. A variety of text processing features enable fine-tuning Sphinx for your particular application requirements, and a number of relevance functions ensures you can tweak search quality as well.
Jekyll can be classified as a tool in the "Static Site Generators" category, while Sphinx is grouped under "Search Engines".
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, Sphinx provides the following key features:
- Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
- Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
- Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
"Github pages integration" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Jekyll, while over 12 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing Sphinx.
Jekyll is an open source tool with 38K GitHub stars and 8.28K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Jekyll's open source repository on GitHub.
Sentry, New Relic, and triGo GmbH are some of the popular companies that use Jekyll, whereas Sphinx is used by Webedia, Grooveshark, and Ansible. Jekyll has a broader approval, being mentioned in 110 company stacks & 123 developers stacks; compared to Sphinx, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.
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 integration74
- Open source54
- It's slick, customisable and hackerish36
- Easy to deploy23
- Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset22
- Gitlab pages integration6
- Best for blogging4
- Easy to integrate localization2
- Low maintenance2
- Huge plugins ecosystem1
- Authoring freedom and simplicity1
Pros of Sphinx
- Fast15
- Simple deployment7
- Open source5
- Lots of extentions0
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Cons of Jekyll
- Build time increases exponentially as site grows4
- Lack of developments lately2
- Dsad1
- Og doesn't work with postings dynamically1
Cons of Sphinx
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Blog Posts
With limited knowledge of CSS/HTML5, Jekyll makes it easy to create templates for static HTML5 sites. Unless I really need a database for something, this is the tool I prefer for standing up websites.
We use Sphinx as the main search indexing system on our clients' websites. It's a more powerful system than we even scratch the surface of, and allows us to index data from a variety of sources.
I settled on Jekyll to be the CMS for my research blog. Out of the box it works, and over time I added to it... why write a dissertation when you can instead hack templates to tweak things.
This static site generator is used with "contentful-import" ruby plugin, which allows to fetch data from Contentfull and generate new web-pages based on it. Easy and fun to use.
We wanted to pay the cost for website generation up front. Doing this allows us to put our website up in AWS S3 where it can be served reliably and for cheap.
We use Jekyll to build our website. We created a collection for talks. We handle speakers and sponsors via data files.