head to head · open source
Ghost vs jekyll
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars, 12,130 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jekyll has 51,745 stars, 10,304 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped 21 days ago. Ghost leads on adoption by 8% (55,658 vs 51,745 stars). Ghost is written in TypeScript under MIT; jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT. Ghost has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, jekyll 20%. Ghost was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Ghost | jekyll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 56K | ★ 52K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 10K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ghost if
- You weight community size — 56K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 Ghost
Ghost.org • Forum • Docs • Contributing • Twitter [!NOTE] Love open source? We're hiring! Ghost is looking staff engineers to join the team and work with us full time The easiest way to get a production instance deployed is with our official Ghost(Pro) managed service. It takes about 2 minutes to launch a new site with worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance all done for you. For most people this ends up being the best value option because of how much time it saves — and 100% of revenue goes to the Ghost Foundation; funding the maintenance and further development of the project itself. So you’ll be…
read the full Ghost overview →
About jekyll
Jekyll [ ][ruby gems] [ ][ci workflow] [ruby gems]: [ci workflow]: [appveyor]: Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator perfect for personal, project, or organization sites. Think of it like 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. Philosophy Jekyll does what you tell it to do — no more, no less. It doesn't try to outsmart…
read the full jekyll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ghost or jekyll more popular?
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars and jekyll has 51,745. Ghost has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ghost and jekyll free?
Both are open source. Ghost is licensed under MIT and jekyll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ghost and jekyll?
Ghost is written in TypeScript 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, Ghost or jekyll?
Choose Ghost if you want the larger community (55,658 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose jekyll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.