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Add to SafariWhen comparing Jekyll vs Squarespace, the Slant community recommends Jekyll for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Jekyll is ranked 1st while Squarespace is ranked 9th. 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 Easy to customize & update
Squarespace's WYSIWYG tools are intuitive and support drag & drop functionality allowing you to change existing layout or add an article quickly.
Pro Responsive templates
Squarespace templates offer an optimal viewing experience depending on the width of the browser window so they will work and look great both on desktop and mobile devices.
Pro Lots of flexibility
Squarspace allows complete creative control over how you want your website to look and function. It can be a complete website.
Pro Extensive styling options
Pro Detailed real-time metrics
Squarspace offers detailed metrics, that can also easily be accessed from your phone via an iOS app.
Pro Attention to detail
Squarespace has a bunch of small nice-to-haves that make it a pleasure to use, like automatically getting a screengrab when adding a video so that the site doesn't load the whole video before the user has clicked on it, or a sign-up process that's sane among other things.
Pro Lots of good example projects
Squarespace offers a great selection of highly polished templates across a variety of categories and styles.
Pro Great support
Squarespace promises to answer all question within an hour.
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 Dependent on a third-party host
This is dependent on a third-party host, instead of creating a site that you can deploy on your own server.
