Middleman vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Middleman: A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment; Pelican: A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic. 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.

Middleman and Pelican can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Middleman are:

• Sass for DRY stylesheets
• CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript
• Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets

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

• 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)

"Rails for static sites" is the top reason why over 17 developers like Middleman, while over 6 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Pelican.

Middleman and Pelican are both open source tools. Pelican with 8.89K GitHub stars and 1.58K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Middleman with 6.49K GitHub stars and 696 GitHub forks.