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Hugo vs MkDocs: What are the differences?
Hugo: A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go. 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; MkDocs: *A static site generator *. 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.
Hugo and MkDocs can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.
Hugo is an open source tool with 37.2K GitHub stars and 4.17K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Hugo's open source repository on GitHub.
Giant Swarm, Kanteron Systems, and Vufuzi are some of the popular companies that use Hugo, whereas MkDocs is used by Hactar, elmah.io, and Worldsensing - Mobility. Hugo has a broader approval, being mentioned in 49 company stacks & 306 developers stacks; compared to MkDocs, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.
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 Hugo
- Lightning fast47
- Single Executable29
- Easy setup26
- Great development community24
- Open source23
- Write in golang13
- Hacker mindset8
- Not HTML only - JSON, RSS7
- LiveReload built in7
- Very fast builds4
- Gitlab pages integration4
- Easy to customize themes4
- Easy to learn3
- Fast builds3
- Well documented3
Pros of MkDocs
- Speed3
- Gitlab integration3
- Extensibility1
- Themes1
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Cons of Hugo
- No Plugins/Extensions4
- Template syntax not friendly2
- Quick builds1