head to head · open source
hugo vs sanity
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sanity has 6,324 stars, 553 forks, 221 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 1,321% (89,854 vs 6,324 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; sanity is written in TypeScript under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, sanity 9%. sanity 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 | sanity | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 553 |
| 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 sanity if
- You want the sanity feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sanity 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 sanity
Sanity Studio is an open source, MIT licensed single page application written in TypeScript that gives developers and content teams a fast to configure, real time workspace for editing structured content, with that content hosted in Sanity's Content Lake.
read the full sanity 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 sanity more popular?
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars and sanity has 6,324. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and sanity free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sanity under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and sanity?
hugo is written in Go and sanity in TypeScript. 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 sanity?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,854 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sanity if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.