When comparing Pelican vs Octopress, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Pelican is ranked 1st while Octopress is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Quite fast even for sites with thousands of posts
Can spin up an build sites with thousands of articles in a matter of seconds even on very old computers.
Pro Very easy to use
Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get going.
Pro Lots of plugins (from Jekyll + 3rd party)
Another advantage of being based on Jekyll is default access to the extensive plugin system for Jekyll. There are also plugins developed specifically for Octopress.
Pro Based on Jekyll
As Octopress is simply a framework on top of Jekyll, it benefits from being based on one of the most popular site generators available. The primary benefit is that it is backed by git and is built in such a way that the site can be easily re-generated if the content changes.
Pro Uses Markdown for writing
Uses the Markdown syntax for writing blogs.
Cons
Con Theme inheritance doesn't seem to be a priority
There have been endless discussions for years but theme inheritance still doesn't seem to be a thing. You can "inherit" from the simple theme so you don't have to have all the required files in your theme, but that's as far as it goes.
Con Not as powerful as other more popular site generators
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
Con Not Actively Developed
Last commit is Feb 22, 2016, Social media hasn't been updated. Dead project?
Con Inefficient
Adding a new post, for example, causes the entire blog to be regenerated.