Alternatives to Hexo logo

Alternatives to Hexo

Jekyll, Ghost, Hugo, Apache Aurora, and WordPress are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Hexo.
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What is Hexo and what are its top alternatives?

Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.
Hexo is a tool in the Static Site Generators category of a tech stack.
Hexo is an open source tool with 38.2K GitHub stars and 4.7K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Hexo's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Hexo

  • Jekyll
    Jekyll

    Think of Jekyll as 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. ...

  • Ghost
    Ghost

    Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. ...

  • Hugo
    Hugo

    Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data. ...

  • Apache Aurora
    Apache Aurora

    Apache Aurora is a service scheduler that runs on top of Mesos, enabling you to run long-running services that take advantage of Mesos' scalability, fault-tolerance, and resource isolation. ...

  • WordPress
    WordPress

    The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family. ...

  • 11ty
    11ty

    A simpler static site generator. An alternative to Jekyll. Written in JavaScript. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML. Works with HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, Haml, Pug, and JavaScript Template Literals. ...

  • Gatsby
    Gatsby

    Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future. ...

  • VuePress
    VuePress

    A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects. ...

Hexo alternatives & related posts

Jekyll logo

Jekyll

2K
1.4K
230
Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby
2K
1.4K
+ 1
230
PROS OF JEKYLL
  • 74
    Github pages integration
  • 54
    Open source
  • 37
    It's slick, customisable and hackerish
  • 24
    Easy to deploy
  • 23
    Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
  • 7
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 5
    Best for blogging
  • 2
    Low maintenance
  • 2
    Easy to integrate localization
  • 1
    Huge plugins ecosystem
  • 1
    Authoring freedom and simplicity
CONS OF JEKYLL
  • 4
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows
  • 2
    Lack of developments lately
  • 1
    Og doesn't work with postings dynamically

related Jekyll posts

Dale Ross
Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

See more
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 490.7K views
Shared insights
on
JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

See more
Ghost logo

Ghost

516
499
219
Just a blogging platform
516
499
+ 1
219
PROS OF GHOST
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
  • 20
    Open source
  • 19
    Non-profit
  • 16
    Seamless writing
  • 6
    Node.js
  • 5
    Fast and Performatic
  • 5
    Javascript
  • 4
    Simplest
  • 3
    Wonderful UI
  • 3
    Handlebars
  • 3
    Full Control
  • 2
    Magic
  • 2
    Clean
  • 1
    Headless CMS
  • 1
    Self-hostable
CONS OF GHOST
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Ghost posts

    Hugo logo

    Hugo

    1.3K
    1.2K
    206
    A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go
    1.3K
    1.2K
    + 1
    206
    PROS OF HUGO
    • 47
      Lightning fast
    • 29
      Single Executable
    • 26
      Easy setup
    • 24
      Great development community
    • 23
      Open source
    • 13
      Write in golang
    • 8
      Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
    • 8
      Hacker mindset
    • 7
      LiveReload built in
    • 4
      Gitlab pages integration
    • 4
      Easy to customize themes
    • 4
      Very fast builds
    • 3
      Well documented
    • 3
      Fast builds
    • 3
      Easy to learn
    CONS OF HUGO
    • 4
      No Plugins/Extensions
    • 2
      Template syntax not friendly
    • 1
      Quick builds

    related Hugo posts

    John-Daniel Trask
    Co-founder & CEO at Raygun · | 19 upvotes · 324.3K views
    Shared insights
    on
    .NET.NETWordPressWordPressHugoHugo
    at

    There’s no doubt WordPress is a great CMS, which is very user friendly. When we started the company, our blog wasn’t really our top priority, and it ended up being hosted on a fairly obscure server within our setup, which didn’t really change much until recently when things become harder to manage and make significant updates.

    As our marketing team increased, the amount of traffic that found us through our content marketing increased. We found ourselves struggling to maintain our Wordpress install given the amount of theme updates, plugins and security patches needing to be applied. Our biggest driver to find an alternative solution however was just how slow Wordpress is at serving content to the end user. I know there will be die hard fans out there with ways to set things up that mean WordPress sites can load quickly, but we needed something a lot more streamlined.

    We could see in our own Real User Monitoring tool that many users were experiencing page load speeds of over five seconds, even longer in worst case scenarios. Hugo is an open source static site generator that has enabled us to reduce load times by over 500% and make our blog far more maintainable across the whole team.

    The Raygun marketing site runs on a .NET CMS called N2 but we plan to swap that out with Hugo as well in future.

    #StaticSiteGenerators #SelfHostedBloggingCms #SupportSalesAndMarketing

    See more
    Josh Dzielak
    Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 490.7K views
    Shared insights
    on
    JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

    Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

    I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

    After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

    See more
    Apache Aurora logo

    Apache Aurora

    69
    96
    0
    An Apcahe Mesos framework for scheduling jobs, originally developed by Twitter
    69
    96
    + 1
    0
    PROS OF APACHE AURORA
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF APACHE AURORA
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Apache Aurora posts

        Docker containers on Mesos run their microservices with consistent configurations at scale, along with Aurora for long-running services and cron jobs.

        See more
        WordPress logo

        WordPress

        95.9K
        38.4K
        2.1K
        A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
        95.9K
        38.4K
        + 1
        2.1K
        PROS OF WORDPRESS
        • 415
          Customizable
        • 366
          Easy to manage
        • 354
          Plugins & themes
        • 258
          Non-tech colleagues can update website content
        • 247
          Really powerful
        • 145
          Rapid website development
        • 78
          Best documentation
        • 51
          Codex
        • 44
          Product feature set
        • 35
          Custom/internal social network
        • 18
          Open source
        • 8
          Great for all types of websites
        • 7
          Huge install and user base
        • 5
          Perfect example of user collaboration
        • 5
          Open Source Community
        • 5
          Most websites make use of it
        • 5
          It's simple and easy to use by any novice
        • 5
          Best
        • 5
          I like it like I like a kick in the groin
        • 4
          Community
        • 4
          API-based CMS
        • 3
          Easy To use
        • 2
          <a href="https://secure.wphackedhel">Easy Beginner</a>
        CONS OF WORDPRESS
        • 13
          Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
        • 13
          Plugins are of mixed quality
        • 10
          Not best backend UI
        • 2
          Complex Organization
        • 1
          Do not cover all the basics in the core
        • 1
          Great Security

        related WordPress posts

        Dale Ross
        Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

        I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

        I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

        Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

        See more
        Siddhant Sharma
        Tech Connoisseur at Channelize.io · | 12 upvotes · 1.1M views

        WordPress Magento PHP Java Swift JavaScript

        Back in the days, we started looking for a date on different matrimonial websites as there were no Dating Applications. We used to create different profiles. It all changed in 2012 when Tinder, an Online Dating application came into India Market.

        Tinder allowed us to communicate with our potential soul mates. That too without paying any extra money. I too got 4-6 matches in 6 years. It changed the life of many Millennials. Tinder created a revolution of its own. P.S. - I still don't have a date :(

        Posting my first article. Please have a look and do give feedback.

        Communication InAppChat Dating Matrimonial #messaging

        See more
        11ty logo

        11ty

        100
        116
        15
        A simpler static site generator
        100
        116
        + 1
        15
        PROS OF 11TY
        • 4
          Flexibility on choosing template
        • 3
          Great use of data files/sources
        • 3
          Flexible, allows progressive conversion of templates
        • 3
          Content decoupled as much as possible from Eleventy
        • 2
          Zero boilerplate client-side JavaScript
        CONS OF 11TY
          Be the first to leave a con

          related 11ty posts

          Jan Vlnas
          Developer Advocate at Superface · | 4 upvotes · 41.7K views

          Depends on what options and technologies you have available, and how do you deploy your website.

          There are CMSs which update existing static pages through FTP: You provide access credentials, mark editable parts of your HTML in a markup, and then edit the content through the hosted CMS. I know two systems which work like that: Cushy CMS and Surreal CMS.

          If the source of your site is versioned through Git (and hosted on GitHub), you have other options, like Netlify CMS, Spinal CMS, Siteleaf, Forestry, or CloudCannon. Some of these also need you to use static site generator (like 11ty, Jekyll, or Hugo).

          If you have some server-side scripting support available (typically PHP) you can also consider some flat-file based, server-side systems, like Kirby CMS or Lektor, which are usually simpler to retrofit into an existing template than “traditional” CMSs (WordPress, Drupal).

          Finally, you could also use a desktop-based static site generator which provides a user-friendly GUI, and then locally generates and uploads the website. For example Publii, YouDoCMS, Agit CMS.

          See more
          Gatsby logo

          Gatsby

          3.3K
          2.4K
          121
          Free, open source framework for building blazing fast websites and apps with React
          3.3K
          2.4K
          + 1
          121
          PROS OF GATSBY
          • 28
            Generated websites are super fast
          • 16
            Fast
          • 15
            GraphQL
          • 10
            Progressive Web Apps generation
          • 9
            Easy to connect with lots of CMS via official plugins
          • 9
            Reusable components (React)
          • 7
            Allows to use markdown files as articles
          • 5
            Static-sites
          • 5
            All the benefits of a static website + React+GraphQL
          • 5
            Images
          • 4
            List of starters as base for new project
          • 3
            Easy to connect with Drupal via official plugin
          • 3
            Open source
          • 1
            Gitlab pages integration
          • 1
            Incremental Build
          CONS OF GATSBY
          • 6
            No ssr
          • 3
            Very slow builds
          • 3
            Documentation isn't complete.
          • 2
            For-profit
          • 2
            Slow builds
          • 2
            Flash of unstyled content issues
          • 1
            Problematic between develop and build commands
          • 1
            Difficult debugging
          • 1
            Too many dependencies
          • 1
            Plugin driven development
          • 1
            Difficult maintenance

          related Gatsby posts

          Johnny Bell

          I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

          I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

          I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

          Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

          Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

          With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

          If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

          See more
          Ronan Levesque
          Software engineer at Algolia · | 18 upvotes · 339K views

          A few months ago we decided to move our whole static website (www.algolia.com) to a new stack. At the time we were using a website generator called Middleman, written in Ruby. As a team of only front-end developers we didn't feel very comfortable with the language itself, and the time it took to build was not satisfying. We decided to move to Gatsby to take advantage of its use of React , as well as its incredibly high performances in terms of build and page rendering.

          See more
          VuePress logo

          VuePress

          379
          418
          8
          A static-site generator built by the Vue.js team
          379
          418
          + 1
          8
          PROS OF VUEPRESS
          • 4
            It's Vue
          • 2
            Created by the vue.js developers
          • 2
            Built in text search feature
          CONS OF VUEPRESS
          • 3
            Its Vue

          related VuePress posts

          Nikolaj Ivancic

          I want to build a documentation tool - functionally equivalent to MkDocs. The initial choice ought to be VuePress - but I know of at least one respectable developer who started with VuePress and switched to Nuxt.js. A rich set of "themes" is a plus and all documents ought to be in Markdown.

          Any opinions?

          See more