head to head · open source
jekyll vs kit
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kit has 9,721 stars, 2,954 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 432% (51,677 vs 9,721 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; kit is written in HTML under MIT. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, kit 30%. jekyll was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | kit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| 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 kit if
- You want the kit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and kit 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 kit
HugoBlox (listed in this registry as kit) is a free, MIT licensed static site framework that turns a plain English description into AI generated pages while keeping every page as Markdown you own, built for academics, researchers, developers, and small teams who need professional landing pages, portfolios, blogs, publications, and documentation without a database or a paid site builder.
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or kit more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and kit has 9,721. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and kit free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and kit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and kit?
jekyll is written in Ruby and kit in HTML. 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 kit?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kit if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.