head to head · open source
jekyll vs marmite
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. marmite has 875 stars, 57 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 5,806% (51,677 vs 875 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 7%. 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 | marmite | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 875 |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-05 |
| 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 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 marmite
Marmite is a Rust static site generator for bloggers that turns a directory of Markdown files into a complete static HTML site with a single command, aimed at writers who want to publish chronological articles without assembling a build pipeline.
read the full marmite overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or marmite more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and marmite has 875. 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 (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose marmite if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.