When comparing Substance vs Pelican, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Pelican is ranked 8th while Substance is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free for one site
One site is free, for other option see pricing.
Pro Easy importing of Jekyll posts
An easy to use interface for migrating from Jekyll is available.
Pro Clean and simple layouts
Substance doesn't clutter your blog, it gets out of the way so people can focus on reading.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.

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 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 Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.

Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Cons
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
Built By the Slant team
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