Here’s the Deal

Blogger vs Jekyll

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When comparing Blogger vs Jekyll, 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 Blogger is ranked 19th. 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

No specs yet!

LanguageRuby

LicenseMIT

Markup LanguagesHTML, Markdown

Template EngineLiquid

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best solutions for a personal blog?

What are the best blogging platforms?

Pros

Pro
No ads

You can turn on ads if you want, but you can also keep your Blogger blog ad-free. That is different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) where there are ads, and you cannot do anything about it.

Pro
Free

hosted by google

Pro
Javascript friendly

You can include Javascript snippets and widgets (like Pinterest widgets for example) in posts and in sidebar items. This makes it very different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) which does not allow javascript plugins.

Pro
Every Google account has one

If you have a Google account from any other of their services, such as Gmail, Youtube or Google+, you automatically have a Blogger account as well.

Pro
Supports multiple authors

Multiple people can contribute to a single blog.

Pro
Custom domain support

You can use either your own URL or a *.blogspot.com URL.

Pro
API

The Blogger API allows you to publish and manage your content via a custom client app

Pro
Allows custom advertisements

Such as project wonderful, or just google adsense,. so you can make money from your blog.

Pro
Android and iOS mobile apps

Allows viewing and editing content from your mobile device.

Pro
Analytics integration

There's very basic analytics, but you can upgrade if needed.

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.

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Cons

Con
Bad post editor

It is a WYSIWYG html editor, and it would be a bit better if it used <p> tags. Instead it uses divs and brs everywhere, which leads to inconsistent or just crappy typography and spacing.

Con
Limited authorization system

Sadly the authorization system is fairly limited. Co authors can post and publish, without you getting a chance to pre-check their posts as an admin. e.g. you can't give them "create" and not give them "publish" permissions. They can only edit their own posts however.