Jekyll vs Hugo: Two Good Static Site Generators

Jekyll and Hugo both turn templates and content into static files. Jekyll has a long history in the Ruby ecosystem and first-class GitHub Pages support. Hugo ships as a fast standalone executable with many publishing features built in.

That makes the initial choice fairly practical: which runtime, template language, and deployment workflow would you rather maintain?

Jekyll fits naturally with GitHub Pages

Jekyll uses Ruby, Liquid templates, and a plugin ecosystem. It is focused on content-driven sites and has a large collection of themes and examples.

GitHub Pages can build supported Jekyll sites directly. Custom plugins are restricted in that managed build, but you can run Jekyll in your own CI workflow when you need more control.

Ruby dependencies can be the slightly awkward part, especially if the rest of a project does not use Ruby. For a simple blog already hosted on GitHub Pages, the integration may outweigh that cost.

Hugo favours speed and built-in features

Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable. Its fast builds become noticeable on larger sites, where rebuilding hundreds or thousands of pages is part of normal development.

It includes taxonomies, menus, image processing, asset tools, shortcodes, and other publishing features. Hugo templates are powerful, although their syntax takes some adjustment if Go templates are new to you.

Hugo is not built around the same kind of plugin ecosystem as Jekyll. Most extension work uses templates, modules, shortcodes, and built-in functions. That can mean fewer runtime dependencies, but it also means solving problems the Hugo way.

Which one would I choose?

I would keep Jekyll for an existing site that works well, especially one using GitHub Pages. Rebuilding a stable blog for a faster local build is not automatically a good use of time.

For a new content-heavy site, I would lean towards Hugo for its build speed and built-in tools. Still, I would make a representative page in both before deciding. You will spend far more time reading template code than admiring benchmark charts.