When comparing Jekyll vs JBake, the Slant community recommends Jekyll for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Jekyll is ranked 5th while JBake is ranked 26th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Server included
Localhost server is included and can be used to preview content during editing process.
Pro Blog Aware
RSS feed, archive and tag support. Posts/Topics are a first-class citizen in jbake.
Pro Runs on / Control from the JVM
The site generator is just a specific usage of the JBake Java API. As such, jbake is easily integrated into other JVM software.
Pro Typical inputs
Markdown, asciidoc, plain HTML is supported
Pro Open Source (MIT License)
boosts permissive MIT License.
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 Runs on the JVM
JVM is a double-edged sword (startup time, memory usage, CPU overhead, ...) which might be considered overkill for a static site generator.