head to head · open source
hugo vs badaso
hugo has 90,116 GitHub stars, 8,390 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. badaso has 1,255 stars, 227 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 7,081% (90,116 vs 1,255 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; badaso is written in PHP under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, badaso 18%. badaso was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cms), 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 | badaso | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-10-13 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 227 |
| 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 badaso if
- You want the badaso feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and badaso 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 badaso
badaso is an open source, MIT licensed Laravel and Vue headless CMS, admin panel, dashboard and CRUD API generator for PHP teams that need to build application backends and admin interfaces without hand writing them.
read the full badaso overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or badaso more popular?
hugo has 90,116 GitHub stars and badaso has 1,255. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and badaso free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and badaso under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and badaso?
hugo is written in Go and badaso in PHP. 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 badaso?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (90,116 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose badaso if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.