head to head · open source
hugo vs jekyll
hugo has 89,858 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped today. jekyll has 51,677 stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 74% (89,858 vs 51,677 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, jekyll 20%. hugo was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (blog-engine, 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.
← all 13541 open source comparisons
Side by side
| hugo | jekyll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 52K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 10K |
| 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 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 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 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 →
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 jekyll more popular?
hugo has 89,858 GitHub stars and jekyll has 51,677. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and jekyll free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and jekyll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and jekyll?
hugo is written in Go 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, hugo or jekyll?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,858 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose jekyll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.