Medium vs Hugo

Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures and great typography.

There are no distractions and with a clean layout and great typography, reading Medium articles is a pleasure.

As soon as you sign-up for the service, you are ready to start writing.

Medium takes away all the clutter without taking away any necessary features for a better writing experience. And it doesn't require knowing Markdown to write, all tools are WYSIWYG.

Has a great network based on tags and search for "Suggest an article" as a similar read to others and for specific categories. Allows you a much bigger audience quicker than most platforms.

Allows for finding new, related content.

A WYSIWYG editor that does not get in the way at all. It is invisible most of the time and only appears when you select something.

Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.

As Medium encourages long-form writing they've re-imagined how comments should work accordingly. You can leave comments for every paragraph separately, so you don't have to reference a specific part in a comments section at the bottom. Technically, the feature is called "notes."

Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.

If you post photos as part of your blog, the interface on Medium is one of the best for both inline uploading as well as display in the post itself.

Medium shows how many people have opened your post and how many have read through it. And how many people have recommended your post.

You can send a draft out to other people and have them edit and leave notes on it.

They can enable this for you upon request.

With so many built-in features and flexibility to use, I would recommend Medium first amongst all.

Code can be viewed on GitHub.

All other SSGs expect you to have a full toolchain setup for their language. Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable for unix, linux, windows and mac. Just download and run.

Create your new site, run the Hugo server, edit. Lather, rinse, repeat. Hugo stays out of the way.

Allows you to see changes in real time.

Can create PDFs, eBooks, RSS-Feeds, language and market specific Websites from single content folder.

We are using Hugo as the base-framework for a full blown knowledge management system, idea-management and inhouse brainstorming tool. Hugo source-code is well structures and comes with top components out of the box, that makes every solution built on this framework incredible fast and scalable accross platforms and corporate silos! Hugo - when being used as a framework is a game-changer that puts Sharepoint, Wordpress and Co. back to the shelf.