head to head · open source
hugo vs decap-cms
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. decap-cms has 19,386 stars, 3,129 forks, 593 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 363% (89,854 vs 19,386 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; decap-cms is written in JavaScript under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, decap-cms 16%. hugo was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cms, content-management-system), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| hugo | decap-cms | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 19K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick hugo if
- You weight community size — 90K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick decap-cms if
- You want the decap-cms feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and decap-cms fits your workflow better
About hugo
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go that renders a complete site in seconds, often less, and it is aimed at developers, technical writers, and content teams who build blogs, documentation sites, portfolios, landing pages, and corporate sites as static files.
About decap-cms
Decap CMS is a Git based content management system for static site generators, distributed as an npm package and released under the MIT License. It is a single page application that a site owner pulls into the /admin part of an existing site, where it presents a clean interface for editing content stored in a Git repository. The project lives in the JavaScript ecosystem and is built with React, and it is the software formerly known as Netlify CMS, renamed in February 2023. It carries the jamstack , headless cms , git based cms , and static site generator topics, and its documentation lives at decapcms.org.…
read the full decap-cms overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or decap-cms more popular?
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars and decap-cms has 19,386. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and decap-cms free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and decap-cms under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and decap-cms?
hugo is written in Go and decap-cms in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, hugo or decap-cms?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,854 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose decap-cms if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.