When comparing Tumblr 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 Tumblr is ranked 8th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
It costs nothing to create a Tumblr account.
Pro Community-driven
It is built around sharing and discovering new, short-form content.
Pro Good customization options
Tumblr allow users to customize their website with many built-in themes. In addition to theme selection, user can also further customize their website either through a customization editor wizard or through a HTML and CSS editor for advanced users.
Pro Supports responsive design & mobile-friendly websites
Tumblr supports responsive design for the website as it will be fitted with the same theme based on which device the user is using to view the website. It can also vary by theme with responsive design availability.
Pro Great mobile apps
Easy to use Windows Phone, iOS and Android are available.
Pro Custom domain support
If you want to use your own domain instead of *.tumblr.com, you can.
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.
Cons
Con It's slow for sites with a lot of posts
Con Little Windows support
Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX.