StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Hexo vs Hugo

Hexo vs Hugo

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Hexo
Hexo
Stacks358
Followers386
Votes70
GitHub Stars41.0K
Forks5.0K
Hugo
Hugo
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes206

Hexo vs Hugo: What are the differences?

Introduction

Hexo and Hugo are two popular static site generators used to build websites. While both have similar goals, there are key differences between the two that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the main differences between Hexo and Hugo.

  1. Ease of use: Hexo and Hugo differ in terms of ease of use. Hexo is known for its simplicity and user-friendly interface, making it a great choice for beginners. On the other hand, Hugo has a steeper learning curve and requires some knowledge of the command line, making it more suitable for developers with a technical background.

  2. Performance: One significant difference between Hexo and Hugo is their performance. Hugo is known for its exceptional speed and can generate websites incredibly fast, thanks to its static website generation process. Hexo, while still efficient, may not be as fast as Hugo when it comes to building larger websites or handling high levels of traffic.

  3. Customization options: Hexo and Hugo offer different levels of customization. Hexo provides a range of themes and plugins that users can easily integrate into their websites, allowing for more flexibility in design and functionality. Hugo, on the other hand, is known for its powerful templating system, which gives users more control over the layout and structure of their websites, making it a better choice for those who require more complex customization options.

  4. Language dependency: Another notable difference between Hexo and Hugo is their language dependency. Hexo is built with JavaScript, making it ideal for developers who are comfortable working with this programming language. In contrast, Hugo is built with Go, making it a suitable choice for developers who prefer working with Go or want to explore this language.

  5. Community and support: Hexo and Hugo have active communities, but their support and community size differ. Hexo has a large and supportive community with plenty of resources, plugins, and themes available. Hugo, on the other hand, also has a strong community but is relatively smaller compared to Hexo, resulting in a slightly more limited range of available resources and a slightly longer learning curve.

  6. Hosting options: Hexo and Hugo offer different hosting options. Hexo is often hosted on GitHub Pages, which is a free and easy-to-use hosting platform that integrates well with Hexo. While Hugo can also be hosted on GitHub Pages, it offers more hosting options due to its static site nature, allowing users to deploy their websites to various hosting platforms.

In summary, Hexo is known for its simplicity and ease of use, has extensive community support, and provides a wide range of themes and plugins. Hugo, on the other hand, offers exceptional performance and customization options, making it a great choice for developers who prefer more control over their website's layout and structure. Ultimately, the choice between Hexo and Hugo depends on the user's technical background, specific requirements, and preferences.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Hexo, Hugo

Axel
Axel

Apr 2, 2021

Review

Me and a lot of colleagues have done documentation collaboratively with https://hackmd.io/ which also comes as an open source fork as https://hedgedoc.org/. The first has commenting function, the latter hasn't. Both make it easy to do doc sprints synchronously which means everybody is on the phone at the same time and write down documentation. As you do this with Markdown you can use your writing with https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ e.g. which is a static site generator running on Python and build beautiful documentation from Markdown files. If you want to build with https://gohugo.io/ I recommend https://www.docsy.dev/ theme.

We do scholarly writing and documentation with GitLab which we host on-premise. GitHub and GitLab come with sophisticated workflows for commenting and quality assurance if you learn to branch and merge which is for a lot of folks a steep learning curve. To onboard colleagues I recommend starting with HedgeDoc first and then migrate to more advanced workflows with Git(Lab|Hub).

22k views22k
Comments
Arnaud
Arnaud

Mar 25, 2022

Needs adviceonGatsbyGatsbyGitHubGitHubAmazon S3Amazon S3

I have been building a website with Gatsby (for a small group of volunteers). I track it in GitHub and push it to Amazon S3.

I am satisfied with it as a single user; however, I would like to get non-technical teammates to be able to post Markdown blog posts. I tried to teach them to add mdx files, git push, gastby build, and publish with gatsby-plugin-s3, but I am getting a fair amount of resistance :).

So I wonder if there are tools, preferably using Node.js, that allow multi-user blog authors a la wordpress, i.e. with an interface for non technical bloggers, but producing static/pre-rendered web pages.

(PS: I am considering having a node/express.js server where they could upload their mdx file and the server would re-build push and publish for them, without having them install anything, but I'd like to know if something already exists before jumping into this endeavor)

66.9k views66.9k
Comments
Joseph
Joseph

Apr 2, 2021

Needs adviceonGatsbyGatsbyGolangGolang

Hi everyone, I'm trying to decide which front-end tool, that will likely use server-side rendering (SSR), in hopes it'll be faster. The end-user will upload a document and they see text output on their screen (like SaaS or microservice). I read that Gatsby can also do SSR. Also want to add a headless CMS that is easy to use.

Backend is in Golang. Open to ideas. Thank you.

59.3k views59.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hexo
Hexo
Hugo
Hugo

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.

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.

Blazing Fast - Node.js brings you incredible generating speed. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build.;Markdown Support - All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported. You can even use most Octopress plugins in Hexo.;One-Command Deployment - You only need one command to deploy your site to GitHub Pages, Heroku or other sites.;Various Plugins - Hexo has a powerful plugin system. You can install more plugins for Jade, CoffeeScript plugins.
Run Anywhere - Hugo is quite possibly the easiest to install software you've ever used, simply download and run. Hugo doesn't depend on administrative privileges, databases, runtimes, interpreters or external libraries. Sites built with Hugo can be deployed on S3, Github Pages, Dropbox or any web host.;Fast & Powerful - Hugo is written for speed and performance. Great care has been taken to ensure that Hugo build time is as short as possible. We're talking milliseconds to build your entire site for most setups.; Flexible - Hugo is designed to work how you do. Organize your content however you want with any URL structure. Declare your own content types. Define your own meta data in YAML, TOML or JSON.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
41.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
358
Stacks
1.3K
Followers
386
Followers
1.2K
Votes
70
Votes
206
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 18
    Ease of deployment
  • 13
    Uses NodeJS and npm
  • 12
    Easy GitHub Pages publishing
  • 10
    Powerful templating
  • 7
    Useful tools and plugins
Pros
  • 47
    Lightning fast
  • 29
    Single Executable
  • 26
    Easy setup
  • 24
    Great development community
  • 23
    Open source
Cons
  • 4
    No Plugins/Extensions
  • 2
    Template syntax not friendly
  • 1
    Quick builds
Integrations
TypeScript
TypeScript
Netlify
Netlify
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript
Heroku
Heroku
Node.js
Node.js
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages
Azure Search
Azure Search
Markdown
Markdown
Golang
Golang

What are some alternatives to Hexo, Hugo?

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.

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.

Middleman

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

Pelican

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.

DocPad

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

Metalsmith

Metalsmith

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

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.

MkDocs

MkDocs

It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.

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.

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope