head to head · open source
jekyll vs marmite
jekyll has 51,745 GitHub stars, 10,304 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped 21 days ago. marmite has 887 stars, 57 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 5,734% (51,745 vs 887 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; marmite is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, marmite 6%. marmite 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 | marmite | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 887 |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-13 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 57 |
| 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 marmite if
- You want the marmite feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and marmite fits your workflow better
About jekyll
Jekyll [ ][ruby gems] [ ][ci workflow] [ruby gems]: [ci workflow]: [appveyor]: Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator perfect for personal, project, or organization sites. Think of it like a file based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories. Philosophy Jekyll does what you tell it to do — no more, no less. It doesn't try to outsmart…
read the full jekyll overview →
About marmite
Marmite Marmite [ Mar kdown m akes s ite s] is a very! simple static site generator. I'm a big user of other SSGs but it is frequently frustrating that it takes so much setup to get started. Just having a directory of markdown files and running a single command sounds really useful. — Michael, marmite user. How it works It does "one" simple thing only: Reads all .md files on the input directory. Using CommonMark parse it to HTML content. Extract optional metadata from frontmatter or filename . Generated html file for each page. Outputs the rendered static site to the output folder. It also handles…
read the full marmite overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or marmite more popular?
jekyll has 51,745 GitHub stars and marmite has 887. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and marmite free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and marmite under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and marmite?
jekyll is written in Ruby and marmite in Rust. 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 marmite?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,745 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose marmite if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.