head to head · open source
hugo vs Drupal
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Drupal has 4,284 stars, 1,986 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 1,997% (89,854 vs 4,284 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Drupal is written in PHP under a licence not recorded in this registry. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Drupal 46%. Drupal 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
| hugo | Drupal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| 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 Drupal if
- You want the Drupal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Drupal 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 Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform written in PHP, built to support websites that range from personal weblogs to large community driven websites. It lives in the Content & Publishing ecosystem, specifically in the Content Management Systems category, and has been developed by an international community on Drupal.org since 2001. The project is published under a license that ships inside the source tree at /core/LICENSE.txt , and the homepage for the distribution is at https://drupal.org/project/drupal.
read the full Drupal overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or Drupal more popular?
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars and Drupal has 4,284. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and Drupal free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Drupal has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between hugo and Drupal?
hugo is written in Go and Drupal 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 Drupal?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,854 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Drupal if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.