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. Nanoc vs Pelican

Nanoc vs Pelican

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pelican
Pelican
Stacks88
Followers113
Votes28
GitHub Stars13.1K
Forks1.8K
Nanoc
Nanoc
Stacks4
Followers3
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.1K
Forks249

Nanoc vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Developers describe Nanoc as "A flexible static-site generator written in Ruby". Nanoc is a static-site generator, fit for building anything from a small personal blog to a large corporate website. On the other hand, Pelican is detailed as "A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic". 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.

Nanoc and Pelican can be primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Nanoc are:

  • Support for free-form metadata
  • Support for various markup languages (Markdown, AsciiDoc, Textile, …)
  • Support for various templating languages (eRuby, Haml, Mustache, …)

On the other hand, Pelican provides the following key features:

  • Blog articles and pages
  • Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.)
  • Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates)

Nanoc and Pelican are both open source tools. It seems that Pelican with 8.95K GitHub stars and 1.59K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Nanoc with 1.75K GitHub stars and 236 GitHub forks.

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

Detailed Comparison

Pelican
Pelican
Nanoc
Nanoc

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.

It is a static-site generator, fit for building anything from a small personal blog to a large corporate website.

Blog articles and pages;Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.);Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates);PDF generation of the articles/pages (optional);Publication of articles in multiple languages;Atom/RSS feeds;Code syntax highlighting;Import from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds;Integration with external tools: Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. (optional);Fast rebuild times thanks to content caching and selective output writing.
Support for free-form metadata; Support for various markup languages (Markdown, AsciiDoc, Textile, …); Support for various templating languages (eRuby, Haml, Mustache, …); Ability to write custom filters and helpers; Ability to pull in data from other sources (databases, web APIs, …); Integration with various deployment mechanisms; Ability to run pre-deployment checks
Statistics
GitHub Stars
13.1K
GitHub Stars
2.1K
GitHub Forks
1.8K
GitHub Forks
249
Stacks
88
Stacks
4
Followers
113
Followers
3
Votes
28
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Jinja2
  • 4
    Easy to deploy
  • 4
    Implemented in Python
  • 3
    Plugability
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Markdown
Markdown
Buddy
Buddy
Markdown
Markdown
GitLab Pages
GitLab Pages

What are some alternatives to Pelican, Nanoc?

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.

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.

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.

Hexo

Hexo

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.

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.

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.

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