When comparing Tumblr 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 3rd while Tumblr is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
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 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.
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.