When comparing WordPress 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 WordPress is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Complete control if needed
If you set up WP on your own server, you can change every single aspect of it as you see fit.
Pro Widely used
According to some statistics, WP powers a fifth of the Internet. It means there are resources for everything. Community support, tutorials, extensions and a plethora of customization options.
Pro Self-host & WP-host options
For free WordPress can be hosted by yourself on your own server, or as a subdomain of wordpress.com. You can also pay to use a custom domain with WP hosting.
Pro Open source
Anyone can view the code of WordPress since it's under a libre/open source license.
Pro RSS feeds for everything
Including tags and categories.
Pro Post-level privacy controls
Each post can have a different access level.
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 A bit of bloat and complexity
WP has grown past being just a blogging platform and as such it's not as lightweight as it used to be. It also considerably more complex due to many more customization options compared to other solutions.
Con Dated
The code is a mess, uses dated conventions, and relies on dated technology.
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.