Add to Chrome
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Add to SafariWhen comparing Jekyll vs Hexo, the Slant community recommends Jekyll for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Jekyll is ranked 5th while Hexo is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Jekyll is:
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using [GitHub pages](http://pages.github.com/).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages.
Pro Can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts
Pro Has a built in server
You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve
Pro Code highlighting with pygments
Jekyll has Pygments code highlighting built in so you can create syntax highlighted code blocks on your blog.
Pro Excels at blogging
Jekyll pages are structured by posts, which makes it easier to build a blog.
Pro Decent documentation
Link to docs
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Jekyll supports importing from many dynamic blog engines:
- CSV
- Drupal 6
- Drupal 7
- Enki
- Google Reader
- Joomla
- Jrnl
- Marley
- Mephisto
- Movable Type
- Posterous
- RSS
- S9Y
- Textpattern
- Tumblr
- Typo
- WordPress
- WordPress.com
Pro Has built in watch mode
Watch mode will reconstruct the site as pages are updated which is great for testing.
Pro Large, active and helpful community
Thanks to it's popularity, Jekyll has a large and active community of users. This means there is plenty of learning material available for Jekyll and it's easy to find help from other users when needed.
Pro Customisable with data and collections
Can make sites very different from blogs but with a lot of pages by making templates using data and collections.
Pro Fast and easy to use
Pro Deployment is easy and fast
Hexo built sites can be easily deployed to Github pages, Heroku, Openshift (custom cartridge needs to be setup) or any other custom solution (just copy over thepublic folder). Any deployment is as simple as editing the _config.yml file and running the hexo deploycommand
Pro Generating a blog is pretty fast
Generating a new blog with Hexo is generally really fast. Hexo truly lives up to it's name as a simple and fast static website generator.
Pro Constantly updated and actively maintained
Hexo's repository in GitHub is very active and it's actively being maintained. Updates are released every two or three months.
Pro Complete and helpful documentation
Hexo's documentation is very thorough and helpful, especially for people who are just starting with it.
Cons
Con It's slow for sites with a lot of posts
Con Little Windows support
Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX.
Con Relatively large community but the majority is non-english speakers
Hexo has a relatively large following and community, especially in China. While this is certainly a positive, many developers who do not know chinese would be unable to follow all the guides and tutorials out there written by their chineses counterparts.
