head to head · open source
jekyll vs actions-gh-pages
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. actions-gh-pages has 5,362 stars, 450 forks, 95 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 864% (51,677 vs 5,362 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; actions-gh-pages is written in TypeScript under MIT. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, actions-gh-pages 8%. jekyll was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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.
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Side by side
| jekyll | actions-gh-pages | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 5.4K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 450 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick jekyll if
- You weight community size — 52K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick actions-gh-pages if
- You want the actions-gh-pages feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and actions-gh-pages fits your workflow better
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 →
About actions-gh-pages
This project is a GitHub Action that deploys static files to GitHub Pages. It lives in the GitHub Actions ecosystem, is written in TypeScript, and is distributed under the MIT license. The action takes a build output directory from a workflow and publishes its contents to a branch that GitHub Pages serves, so a repository can go from committed source to a live site without any manual upload step. It is designed to pair with static site generators rather than to replace them, and the topic list names Hugo, MkDocs, Gatsby, mdBook, Next, Nuxt, and VuePress among the tools it is used alongside.
read the full actions-gh-pages overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or actions-gh-pages more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and actions-gh-pages has 5,362. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and actions-gh-pages free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and actions-gh-pages under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and actions-gh-pages?
jekyll is written in Ruby and actions-gh-pages 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, jekyll or actions-gh-pages?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose actions-gh-pages if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.