When comparing Pelican vs Sitegen, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Pelican is ranked 1st while Sitegen is ranked 32nd. 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 Easy configuration
You configure the site with a site.moon file. It is written in MoonScript.
Pro Powerful templating
It uses the cosmo templating language. It enables you to inject stuff into the page as it is being generated.
Pro Extendable through plugins
It has a plugin system. It comes bundled with some plugins already, like syntax highlighting. You can write your own plugins.
Pro HTML and Markdown
Pages and templates can be written in HTML or Markdown
Pro Easy
It's pretty easy to get started with.
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.