head to head · open source
hugo vs beacon
hugo has 89,858 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped today. beacon has 1,260 stars, 135 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. hugo leads on adoption by 7,032% (89,858 vs 1,260 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; beacon is written in Elixir under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, beacon 11%. hugo 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| hugo | beacon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 135 |
| 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 beacon if
- You want the beacon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and beacon 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 beacon
Beacon Beacon is a content management system (CMS) built with Phoenix LiveView. It brings the rendering speed benefits of Phoenix to even the most content heavy pages with faster render times to boost SEO performance. Getting Started Install both Phoenix and Igniter installers: Now you can either create a new Phoenix project with Beacon or add Beacon to an existing Phoenix project: Create a new project Using latest published beacon and beacon live admin packages: Or using the unreleased projects from GitHub from the main branch: Replace my app and my site with the names you want to generate and follow the prompts…
read the full beacon overview →
More in Content & Publishing
Related comparisons
More Content Management Systems (CMS) projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Content Management Systems (CMS) field.
Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or beacon more popular?
hugo has 89,858 GitHub stars and beacon has 1,260. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and beacon free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and beacon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and beacon?
hugo is written in Go and beacon in Elixir. 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 beacon?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,858 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose beacon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.