Static Site Generators

vitepress17.5k★

VitePress generates static sites from Markdown files with near-instant hot reload during development. It's the official successor to VuePress, rebuilt on top of Vite for speed. Fully free under MIT. Write Markdown, configure a theme, deploy anywhere static sites work (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages). Built-in search, sidebar navigation, dark mode, and internationalization. Vue components work inside your Markdown if you need interactive examples. The catch: VitePress is laser-focused on documentation. If you want a blog, portfolio, or general-purpose static site, look at Astro or Hugo. The default theme is clean but opinionated. Heavy customization requires understanding Vue's component system. And if you're not in the Vue ecosystem, there's no particular reason to choose VitePress over Docusaurus (React) or Starlight (Astro).

Pelican13.3k★

Pelican generates static sites from Python with no JavaScript framework, no build system drama, no React. Pelican generates HTML from your content files and that's it. It's a Python-based static site generator that's been around since 2010 and does exactly one thing well. AGPL v3. You write Markdown, run a command, get a folder of HTML files you can host anywhere for pennies. Themes, plugins, RSS feeds, code syntax highlighting, all built in. Fully free. No paid tier, no cloud service, no account. You install it with pip, write content, generate, deploy to any static host (Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, an S3 bucket, all free or nearly free). The catch: Pelican is old-school. No hot reload, no component system, no modern frontend niceties. The theme ecosystem is smaller and less polished than Hugo or Astro. And AGPL v3 means if you modify Pelican itself and offer it as a service, you must open source your changes. For a personal blog or documentation site, it's solid and simple. For anything interactive, look elsewhere.

metalsmith7.8k★

Metalsmith is a pluggable static site generator built on a simple idea: everything is a plugin. Your source files go in, get transformed through a pipeline of plugins, and static HTML comes out. No opinions about templating, markdown processing, or file structure. JavaScript, MIT. The architecture is elegant: Metalsmith reads files into an object, passes that object through plugins in sequence, and writes the result. Each plugin is just a function. You compose your build pipeline by chaining them. Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. It's an npm package. Solo developers who want to understand how static site generators work under the hood: Metalsmith is a great learning tool. For building something you'll maintain long-term, use Astro or Eleventy. The community support and plugin quality aren't comparable. The real catch: choosing Metalsmith in 2026 means choosing to maintain your own tooling. The flexibility is real but the cost is isolation from a living ecosystem. The catch, and this is a big one: Metalsmith's best days are behind it. Zero star velocity. The JavaScript static site ecosystem moved on to Astro, Eleventy, Hugo, and Next.js. The plugin ecosystem exists but many plugins are unmaintained. You'll find yourself writing custom plugins or fixing abandoned ones.

zine1.3k★

Zine is a static site generator written in Zig that compiles your content into HTML with zero JavaScript runtime. No Node, no npm, no webpack. You write content in a custom markup language, define layouts, and it spits out a fast static site. MIT license, very early. The pitch is speed and simplicity: the Zig compiler handles everything in a single binary. No dependency hell, no node_modules folder. Hot reload works during development. Everything is free. No paid tier, no cloud offering. You get the full tool. Solo developers experimenting with Zig or wanting a minimal static site generator will find this interesting. Teams should wait; the ecosystem is tiny, documentation is sparse, and the custom markup language means your content isn't portable to Hugo or Astro if you switch later. The catch: Zig itself is pre-1.0 and so is Zine. The community is small enough that if you hit a bug, you're probably filing the issue. If you need a production static site today, Hugo or Astro are safer bets. Zine is a bet on the Zig ecosystem maturing.

plenti1.1k★

A static site generator written in Go that compiles Svelte components into static HTML. If you like Svelte's component model but want the output to be a fast static site with no heavy JavaScript framework shipping to the browser, Plenti is an interesting experiment. It handles routing, content (JSON-based), and builds, all in a single binary with no Node.js dependency for the build step. The developer experience is nice for small projects: create content as JSON files, write layouts in Svelte, run `plenti build`, deploy static files. The Go binary means builds are fast and there's no node_modules to manage. Completely free under Apache 2.0. No paid tier, no cloud service. For production sites, Astro does the "components to static HTML" thing with massive community support, multiple framework options (Svelte, React, Vue), and active development. SvelteKit is the official Svelte meta-framework with SSG support. The catch: this is a small project with near-zero recent activity. The bus factor is essentially one developer. The documentation is sparse, the community is tiny, and if you hit a bug, you're likely reading source code to fix it. Plenti is interesting as a concept (Go binary, Svelte components, no Node runtime) but the ecosystem risk is real. Use it for personal projects or experiments, not production sites you need to maintain.

Franklin.jl1.1k★

Franklin.jl is a static site generator built for the Julia ecosystem. It does what Jekyll or Hugo does, but with native Julia code evaluation baked in. Write markdown, drop in Julia code blocks, and the output renders directly into your pages. Free, MIT licensed. The setup is a Julia package install and a single command to serve locally. It handles LaTeX math rendering via KaTeX, syntax highlighting, and live preview during development. Optionally integrates with Python and Node.js for extra optimization, but neither is required for the basics. Julia developers writing technical blogs, documentation sites, or research pages get the most out of this. The live code evaluation is the killer feature: your plots and computations stay current with your actual codebase. The catch: this is Julia-only. If your team doesn't use Julia, Hugo or Astro will serve you better with larger ecosystems and more themes. Franklin's template selection is small and the community is niche.