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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Jekyll vs Netlify

Jekyll vs Netlify

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Jekyll
Jekyll
Stacks2.0K
Followers1.4K
Votes230
GitHub Stars51.0K
Forks10.2K
Netlify
Netlify
Stacks3.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes207

Jekyll vs Netlify: What are the differences?

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.

What is Netlify? Build, deploy and host your static site or app with a drag and drop interface and automatic delpoys from GitHub or Bitbucket. Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.

Jekyll and Netlify are primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" and "Static Web Hosting" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Jekyll are:

  • 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.

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

  • Global Network
  • Global Network
  • Instant Cache Validation

"Github pages integration" is the primary reason why developers consider Jekyll over the competitors, whereas "Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments" was stated as the key factor in picking Netlify.

Jekyll is an open source tool with 38.1K GitHub stars and 8.31K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Jekyll's open source repository on GitHub.

Sentry, New Relic, and Tilt are some of the popular companies that use Jekyll, whereas Netlify is used by Startae, Ratio, and Flat. Jekyll has a broader approval, being mentioned in 111 company stacks & 125 developers stacks; compared to Netlify, which is listed in 85 company stacks and 104 developer stacks.

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Advice on Jekyll, Netlify

Howie
Howie

Full Stack Engineer at Yintrust

Aug 13, 2020

DecidedonNetlifyNetlify

We use Netlify to host static websites.

The reasons for choosing Netlify over GitHub Pages are as follows:

  • Netfily can bind multiple domain names, while GitHub Pages can only bind one domain name
  • With Netfily, the original repository can be private, while GitHub Pages free tier requires the original repository to be public

In addition, in order to use CDN, we use Netlify DNS.

238k views238k
Comments
Manuel
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
Kazim
Kazim

Founder & Developer at Devkind

May 13, 2020

Needs advice

Fastest and quickest way to do static HTML site which is extremely fast? Do you consider above tools or is there anything more quicker or better? This is just a one time one pager site for now, no backend required. I might have such projects in future, having something to get familiar with which can immediately come into action to develop would be great advise!

53.5k views53.5k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jekyll
Jekyll
Netlify
Netlify

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.

Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.

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.
Global Network;Global Network;Instant Cache Validation;Atomic Deploys;API proxying;SSL for custom domains;Continuous Deployment;Link to Github or Bitbucket
Statistics
GitHub Stars
51.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
10.2K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.0K
Stacks
3.6K
Followers
1.4K
Followers
2.1K
Votes
230
Votes
207
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 74
    Github pages integration
  • 54
    Open source
  • 37
    It's slick, customisable and hackerish
  • 24
    Easy to deploy
  • 23
    Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
Cons
  • 4
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows
  • 2
    Lack of developments lately
  • 1
    Og doesn't work with postings dynamically
Pros
  • 48
    Easy deploy
  • 43
    Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments
  • 23
    Free SSL support
  • 23
    Super simple deploys
  • 16
    Easy Setup and Continous deployments
Cons
  • 7
    It's expensive
  • 1
    Bandwidth limitation
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket

What are some alternatives to Jekyll, Netlify?

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages

Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

DomainRacer

DomainRacer

It is a blazing fast hosting solution that provides Customer Satisfaction driven Web Hosting services since 2016.

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.

Vercel

Vercel

A cloud platform for serverless deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.

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.

Surge

Surge

Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.

Webflow

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!

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.

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