head to head · open source
gatsby vs jekyll
gatsby has 55,939 GitHub stars, 10,115 forks, 450 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jekyll has 51,677 stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gatsby leads on adoption by 8% (55,939 vs 51,677 stars). gatsby is written in JavaScript under MIT; jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT. gatsby has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, jekyll 20%. jekyll was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (static-site-generator), 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
| gatsby | jekyll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 56K | ★ 52K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 10K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gatsby if
- You weight community size — 56K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick jekyll if
- You want the jekyll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and jekyll fits your workflow better
About gatsby
Gatsby is a free and open source, React based framework for building websites and applications, released under the MIT license and written primarily in JavaScript. It combines the control and scalability of dynamically rendered sites with the speed of static site generation, and it sits in the JavaScript and React ecosystem as a static site generator, a compiler, and a GraphQL driven build tool. The project has been developed for roughly eleven years, carries 55,939 stars and 10,117 forks on GitHub, and currently has 450 open issues.
read the full gatsby overview →
About jekyll
Jekyll is a blog aware static site generator written in Ruby and released under the MIT license. It takes content written in Markdown together with Liquid templates and renders a complete static website that can be served by Apache, Nginx, or any other web server. The project describes itself as a file based CMS without the complexity of a database backed one, and it is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which hosts sites directly from GitHub repositories. It lives in the Ruby ecosystem, is distributed as a gem, and has been developed for roughly eighteen years.
read the full jekyll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gatsby or jekyll more popular?
gatsby has 55,939 GitHub stars and jekyll has 51,677. gatsby has the larger community by that measure.
Are gatsby and jekyll free?
Both are open source. gatsby is licensed under MIT and jekyll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gatsby and jekyll?
gatsby is written in JavaScript and jekyll in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, gatsby or jekyll?
Choose gatsby if you want the larger community (55,939 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose jekyll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.