Jekyll vs WordPress

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jekyll

1.6K
1.4K
+ 1
230
WordPress

91.7K
35K
+ 1
2.1K
Add tool

Jekyll vs WordPress: What are the differences?

Developers describe Jekyll as "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. On the other hand, WordPress is detailed as "A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability". The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Jekyll and WordPress are primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" and "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" 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, WordPress provides the following key features:

  • Flexibility
  • Publishing Tools
  • User Management

"Github pages integration" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Jekyll, while over 397 developers mention "Customizable" as the leading cause for choosing WordPress.

Jekyll and WordPress are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38.1K GitHub stars and 8.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than WordPress with 12.6K GitHub stars and 7.69K GitHub forks.

Stack Exchange, ebay, and LinkedIn are some of the popular companies that use WordPress, whereas Jekyll is used by Sentry, New Relic, and Tilt. WordPress has a broader approval, being mentioned in 5305 company stacks & 1389 developers stacks; compared to Jekyll, which is listed in 111 company stacks and 125 developer stacks.

Decisions about Jekyll and WordPress
Manuel Feller
Frontend Engineer at BI X · | 4 upvotes · 139.7K views

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.

See more
Xander Groesbeek
Founder at Rate My Meeting · | 5 upvotes · 186.1K views

So many choices for CMSs these days. So then what do you choose if speed, security and customization are key? Headless for one. Consuming your own APIs for content is absolute key. It makes designing pages in the front-end a breeze. Leaving Ghost and Cockpit. If I then looked at the footprint and impact on server load, Cockpit definitely wins that battle.

See more

10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com

See more
Dale Ross
Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.3M views

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Jekyll
Pros of WordPress
  • 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
  • 7
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 5
    Best for blogging
  • 2
    Low maintenance
  • 2
    Easy to integrate localization
  • 1
    Huge plugins ecosystem
  • 1
    Authoring freedom and simplicity
  • 413
    Customizable
  • 364
    Easy to manage
  • 352
    Plugins & themes
  • 258
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
  • 246
    Really powerful
  • 144
    Rapid website development
  • 77
    Best documentation
  • 51
    Codex
  • 44
    Product feature set
  • 35
    Custom/internal social network
  • 16
    Open source
  • 8
    Great for all types of websites
  • 6
    Huge install and user base
  • 5
    I like it like I like a kick in the groin
  • 5
    It's simple and easy to use by any novice
  • 5
    Perfect example of user collaboration
  • 5
    Open Source Community
  • 5
    Most websites make use of it
  • 5
    Best
  • 4
    Community
  • 4
    API-based CMS
  • 3
    Easy To use
  • 2
    <a href="https://secure.wphackedhel">Easy Beginner</a>

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Jekyll
Cons of WordPress
  • 4
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows
  • 2
    Lack of developments lately
  • 1
    Og doesn't work with postings dynamically
  • 12
    Plugins are of mixed quality
  • 12
    Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
  • 9
    Not best backend UI
  • 2
    Complex Organization
  • 1
    Great Security

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is 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.

What is WordPress?

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jobs that mention Jekyll and WordPress as a desired skillset
CBRE
United States of America Oregon The Dalles
CBRE
United States of America Nebraska Omaha
CBRE
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland England Canary Wharf
What companies use Jekyll?
What companies use WordPress?
See which teams inside your own company are using Jekyll or WordPress.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Jekyll?
What tools integrate with WordPress?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

GitHubPythonSlack+25
7
3042
What are some alternatives to Jekyll and WordPress?
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.
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.
Ghost
Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.
Sphinx
It lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with it pretty much as with a database server.
Pelican
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.
See all alternatives