head to head · open source
hugo vs piranha.core
hugo has 90,326 GitHub stars, 8,447 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. piranha.core has 2,201 stars, 613 forks, 100 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. hugo leads on adoption by 4,004% (90,326 vs 2,201 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; piranha.core is written in C# under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, piranha.core 28%. 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.
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Side by side
| hugo | piranha.core | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 613 |
| 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 piranha.core if
- You want the piranha.core feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and piranha.core fits your workflow better
About hugo
[Clang]: [GCC]: [Git]: [Go]: [bep]: [bugs]: [contributing]: CONTRIBUTING.md [create a proposal]: [dart sass]: [details]: [documentation repository]: [documentation]: [dragonfly bsd, freebsd, netbsd, and openbsd]: [features]: [forum]: [friends]: [hugo modules]: [installation]: [issue queue]: [linux]: [macos]: [prebuilt binary]: [requesting help]: [spf13]: [static site generator]: [support]: [themes]: [transpile sass to css]: [website]: [windows]: A fast and flexible static site generator built with love by [bep][], [spf13][], and [friends][] in Go. [Website][] [Installation][] [Documentation][] [Support][]…
About piranha.core
Welcome to Piranha.Core About Piranha CMS is a decoupled, cross platform CMS built for .NET8 and Entity Framework Core . It has a modular and extensible architecture and supports a multitude of hosting and deployment scenarios. Getting started Prerequisites .NET 8.0 SDK An IDE or Editor of your choice Create a new project from our templates To use our project templates you first need to download and install them from NuGet. This can be done with: bash dotnet new install Piranha.Templates When creating a new project with dotnet new you should first create a new empty folder. The default behaviour is that the new…
read the full piranha.core overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or piranha.core more popular?
hugo has 90,326 GitHub stars and piranha.core has 2,201. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and piranha.core free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and piranha.core under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and piranha.core?
hugo is written in Go and piranha.core in C#. 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 piranha.core?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (90,326 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose piranha.core if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.