head to head · open source
jekyll vs htmly
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. htmly has 1,362 stars, 306 forks, 54 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 3,694% (51,677 vs 1,362 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; htmly is written in PHP under GPL-2.0. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, htmly 22%. jekyll was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (blog-engine, markdown), 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 | htmly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-01-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 306 |
| 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 htmly if
- You want the htmly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and htmly 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 htmly
HTMLy is an open source blogging platform and flat file CMS written in PHP. It serves people who want a blog or simple website without running a database server. The project stores content in files and uses an algorithm to list material by date, type, category, tag, or author. It lives in the PHP web publishing ecosystem.
read the full htmly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or htmly more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and htmly has 1,362. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and htmly free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and htmly under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and htmly?
jekyll is written in Ruby and htmly 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, jekyll or htmly?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose htmly if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.