Pelican vs Sphinx: What are the differences?

Developers describe Pelican as "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. On the other hand, Sphinx is detailed as "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.

Pelican 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 Pelican are:

• 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)

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

"Open source" is the top reason why over 6 developers like Pelican, while over 12 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing Sphinx.

Pelican is an open source tool with 8.89K GitHub stars and 1.58K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Pelican's open source repository on GitHub.