Hugo vs Pelican

Overview

Pelican

Stacks88

Followers113

Votes28

GitHub Stars13.1K

Forks1.8K

Hugo

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes206

Hugo vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Introduction

Hugo and Pelican are both static site generators used to build websites. They differ in certain aspects, which are outlined below.

Development Language: Hugo is developed in Go, while Pelican is developed in Python. This means that developers who are more proficient in one language than the other may prefer one over the other. Additionally, the availability of plugins and community support can vary based on the popularity of the language.
Performance and Speed: Hugo is known for its speed and performance. It uses a single executable file written in Go, enabling it to process and build websites quickly, even with a large number of pages. On the other hand, Pelican may be slower when dealing with larger websites or sites with complex features due to its reliance on Python and its dependencies.
Customization and Themes: Both Hugo and Pelican offer a range of themes and templates to choose from. However, Hugo provides more customization options out of the box, with a wider selection of pre-built themes. It also has a powerful templating language that allows for easy customization and flexibility. Pelican, on the other hand, may require more manual configuration and coding to achieve similar levels of customization.
Content Organization: Hugo organizes content using a section and page hierarchy, allowing for easy categorization and navigation. This makes it suitable for larger websites with complex content structures. Pelican, on the other hand, organizes content using a category, tags, and articles structure, which may be more suitable for smaller websites or personal blogs with simpler content organization needs.
Plugin Ecosystem: Hugo has a growing and active plugin ecosystem, with a wide range of community-developed plugins available for extending its functionality. On the other hand, Pelican has a smaller plugin ecosystem, with fewer available plugins. This may limit the extensibility and flexibility of Pelican compared to Hugo in certain cases.
Community and Documentation: Both Hugo and Pelican have active communities and provide comprehensive documentation. However, Hugo has gained popularity more recently and has a larger user community, which may result in more extensive community support and resources available online.

In Summary, Hugo and Pelican differ in their development language, performance, customization options, content organization, plugin ecosystem, and community support.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Pelican, Hugo

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

Joseph

Apr 2, 2021

Needs adviceon

Gatsby

Golang

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

Manuel

Frontend Engineer at BI X

Jul 22, 2020

Decided

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.

178k views178k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Pelican	Hugo
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.	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.
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.	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 13.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 88	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 113	Followers 1.2K
Votes 28	Votes 206
Pros & Cons
Pros 7 Open source 6 Jinja2 4 Easy to deploy 4 Implemented in Python 3 Plugability	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
Markdown	Markdown Golang

What are some alternatives to Pelican, Hugo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Hugo vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Introduction

Hugo and Pelican are both static site generators used to build websites. They differ in certain aspects, which are outlined below.

Development Language: Hugo is developed in Go, while Pelican is developed in Python. This means that developers who are more proficient in one language than the other may prefer one over the other. Additionally, the availability of plugins and community support can vary based on the popularity of the language.
Performance and Speed: Hugo is known for its speed and performance. It uses a single executable file written in Go, enabling it to process and build websites quickly, even with a large number of pages. On the other hand, Pelican may be slower when dealing with larger websites or sites with complex features due to its reliance on Python and its dependencies.
Customization and Themes: Both Hugo and Pelican offer a range of themes and templates to choose from. However, Hugo provides more customization options out of the box, with a wider selection of pre-built themes. It also has a powerful templating language that allows for easy customization and flexibility. Pelican, on the other hand, may require more manual configuration and coding to achieve similar levels of customization.
Content Organization: Hugo organizes content using a section and page hierarchy, allowing for easy categorization and navigation. This makes it suitable for larger websites with complex content structures. Pelican, on the other hand, organizes content using a category, tags, and articles structure, which may be more suitable for smaller websites or personal blogs with simpler content organization needs.
Plugin Ecosystem: Hugo has a growing and active plugin ecosystem, with a wide range of community-developed plugins available for extending its functionality. On the other hand, Pelican has a smaller plugin ecosystem, with fewer available plugins. This may limit the extensibility and flexibility of Pelican compared to Hugo in certain cases.
Community and Documentation: Both Hugo and Pelican have active communities and provide comprehensive documentation. However, Hugo has gained popularity more recently and has a larger user community, which may result in more extensive community support and resources available online.

In Summary, Hugo and Pelican differ in their development language, performance, customization options, content organization, plugin ecosystem, and community support.