head to head · open source
jekyll vs bridgetown
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. bridgetown has 1,365 stars, 132 forks, 44 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 3,686% (51,677 vs 1,365 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; bridgetown is written in Ruby under MIT. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, bridgetown 10%. jekyll was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (blog-engine, ruby, 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 | bridgetown | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 132 |
| 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 bridgetown if
- You want the bridgetown feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and bridgetown 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 bridgetown
Bridgetown is a Ruby powered progressive site generator and fullstack framework for building blogs, documentation sites, and personal websites. It lives in the Ruby and Jamstack ecosystem, combining static site generation with optional dynamic web application functionality through Roda.
read the full bridgetown overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or bridgetown more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and bridgetown has 1,365. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and bridgetown free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and bridgetown under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and bridgetown?
jekyll is written in Ruby and bridgetown in Ruby. 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 bridgetown?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose bridgetown if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.