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 10th while Substance is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Question 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 Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
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.
Cons
