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Cactus vs Jekyll: What are the differences?
What is Cactus? Static site generator for designers. Uses Python and Django templates. Cactus makes setting up a website look easy. Choose a template for a blog, portfolio or single page and Cactus generates all files and folders to get you on your way.
What is Jekyll? Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby. 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.
Cactus and Jekyll can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.
Some of the features offered by Cactus are:
- Mac App
- Focus on editing - Under the hood, Cactus runs a small local web server for each website you're working on. This makes it possible to build your website locally, using modern web technologies, and have the results generated to a collection of flat files.
- Live preview anywhere - Cactus monitors all changes you make to your files and automatically refreshes your browser. Preview your project on mobile devices, and they'll instantly refresh too.
On the other hand, Jekyll provides the following key features:
- Simple - No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content.
- Static - Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
- Blog-aware - Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.
Cactus and Jekyll are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38K GitHub stars and 8.28K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Cactus with 3.29K GitHub stars and 313 GitHub forks.
As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML or Markdown (what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.
Pros of Cactus
- Mac app2
- One-click S3 integration1
- Django templates1
Pros of Jekyll
- Github pages integration74
- Open source54
- It's slick, customisable and hackerish37
- Easy to deploy24
- Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset23
- Gitlab pages integration7
- Best for blogging5
- Low maintenance2
- Easy to integrate localization2
- Huge plugins ecosystem1
- Authoring freedom and simplicity1
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Cons of Cactus
Cons of Jekyll
- Build time increases exponentially as site grows4
- Lack of developments lately2
- Og doesn't work with postings dynamically1
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