head to head · open source
jekyll vs react-snap
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars, 10,300 forks, 258 open issues and last shipped yesterday. react-snap has 5,117 stars, 396 forks, 192 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. jekyll leads on adoption by 910% (51,677 vs 5,117 stars). jekyll is written in Ruby under MIT; react-snap is written in JavaScript under MIT. jekyll has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, react-snap 8%. 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 | react-snap | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-02-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 396 |
| 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 react-snap if
- You want the react-snap feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and react-snap 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 react-snap
react snap is a JavaScript tool that pre renders a single page application into static HTML. It operates in the npm and JavaScript ecosystem as a framework agnostic prerendering utility, and it gives SPAs generated markup that search engines and social crawlers can read from static HTML.
read the full react-snap overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is jekyll or react-snap more popular?
jekyll has 51,677 GitHub stars and react-snap has 5,117. jekyll has the larger community by that measure.
Are jekyll and react-snap free?
Both are open source. jekyll is licensed under MIT and react-snap under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jekyll and react-snap?
jekyll is written in Ruby and react-snap in JavaScript. 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 react-snap?
Choose jekyll if you want the larger community (51,677 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose react-snap if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.