head to head · open source
jekyll vs elm-pages
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. elm-pages has 692 stars, 102 forks, 81 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 7,368% (51,677 vs 692 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; elm-pages is written in Elm under BSD-3-Clause. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, elm-pages 15%. 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 | elm-pages | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 692 |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Ruby | Elm |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-05-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 102 |
| 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 elm-pages if
- You want the elm-pages feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Elm
- You evaluated both and elm-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 elm-pages
elm pages elm pages is a framework for building an Elm single page app that is able to seamlessly interface with data from an Elm Backend. elm pages is a hybrid framework, allowing you to define Routes that are either server rendered (for more dynamic content with user specific or request specific data) or pre rendered at build time (for generating static HTML files that are hosted through a CDN). You can mix and match server rendered and pre rendered routes in your app. elm pages also has a command for running pure Elm scripts with a single command. See the elm pages Scripts docs page. What's new in 12.2 Tui — b…
read the full elm-pages overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or elm-pages more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and elm-pages has 692. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and elm-pages free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and elm-pages under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and elm-pages?
jekyll is written in Ruby and elm-pages in Elm. 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 elm-pages?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose elm-pages if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.