head to head · open source
hugo vs wondercms
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars, 8,381 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. wondercms has 740 stars, 168 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. hugo leads on adoption by 12,042% (89,854 vs 740 stars). hugo is written in Go under Apache-2.0; wondercms is written in PHP under MIT. hugo has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, wondercms 23%. hugo 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| hugo | wondercms | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 90K | ★ 740 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 168 |
| 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 wondercms if
- You want the wondercms feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and wondercms 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 wondercms
WonderCMS is a flat file content management system written in PHP and distributed under the MIT license. It is presented as a five file project, approximately 50KB when zipped, and it stores site data in a JSON database instead of a conventional external database server. The project lives in the content management system ecosystem, specifically the flat file CMS niche, and its topics include blogs, landing pages, lightweight sites, and content management.
read the full wondercms 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 wondercms more popular?
hugo has 89,854 GitHub stars and wondercms has 740. hugo has the larger community by that measure.
Are hugo and wondercms free?
Both are open source. hugo is licensed under Apache-2.0 and wondercms under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hugo and wondercms?
hugo is written in Go and wondercms 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 wondercms?
Choose hugo if you want the larger community (89,854 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose wondercms if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.