head to head · open source
hugo vs Statamic
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Statamic has 4,891 stars, 642 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hugo leads on adoption by 1,737% (89,854 vs 4,891 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Statamic is written in PHP under a custom or non-standard licence. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Statamic 13%. Statamic was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cms, content-management-system), 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 | Statamic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 642 |
| 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 Statamic if
- You want the Statamic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Statamic 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 Statamic
Statamic is a content management system built for the Laravel ecosystem, distributed as a Composer package that is installed into an existing Laravel application. It describes itself as a flat first CMS powered by Laravel and Git, and the repository holds the core package rather than a standalone application. A separate application repository provides a Laravel project preconfigured with Statamic, which the Statamic CLI tool uses when creating a new project.
read the full Statamic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is hugo or Statamic more popular?
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars and Statamic has 4,891. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and Statamic free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Statamic has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between hugo and Statamic?
hugo is written in Go and Statamic 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 Statamic?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,854 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Statamic if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.