Hugo vs Jekyll

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 736 words

Jekyll's remaining advantage over Hugo fits in one sentence: push a Jekyll repo to GitHub and GitHub Pages builds and hosts it with no workflow file, no binary, and no build minutes. Everything else about the matchup has gone Hugo's way. Hugo builds an order of magnitude faster, installs as one file, runs identically on any OS, and has a theme ecosystem still being added to, while Jekyll (Ruby, MIT, 51,649 stars, first released in 2008) is the mature tool it was in 2016 with fewer people around it. Both produce a folder of HTML, so the visitor never knows which you chose; the choice is entirely about your Tuesday evenings.

Installation is the first fork in the road

Hugo is a single Go binary; on a Mac or Linux box the whole setup is:

brew install hugo
hugo new site blog && cd blog
hugo server

Jekyll needs a Ruby environment first, which on macOS means avoiding the system Ruby and on Windows means a dedicated installer:

gem install bundler jekyll
jekyll new blog && cd blog
bundle exec jekyll serve

On a bad day that second set means Ruby version mismatches, native gem compilation failing on a fresh machine, and bundle exec becoming a reflex. The catalogue's "Ruby toolchain required" con is the largest single reason Jekyll users drift to Hugo, and it never fully goes away. Hugo's equivalent con, "templating has a learning curve", is real but front-loaded: once your theme works, there is nothing to maintain.

Build speed matters past a few hundred posts

Hugo (Go, Apache-2.0, 89,545 stars, around since 2013) renders on the order of a millisecond per page, so a 2,000-post archive rebuilds in a couple of seconds. Jekyll on the same archive is minutes, and incremental builds help less than the flag name suggests. Under 100 posts you will not notice. Past 1,000, the "slower builds on large sites" con turns into a reason to dread adding a tag page. The 128 MB against 256 MB minimum RAM figures in the catalogue are both trivial; the time figures are not.

Liquid is friendlier, Go templates are more capable

Jekyll's Liquid syntax is the one thing most people prefer about it. {{ page.title }} and {% for post in site.posts %} read like the HTML around them, and there is an answer on Stack Overflow for nearly everything because Shopify uses the same language. Hugo's Go templates are terser and stranger, with {{ range .Pages }} and a dot that means "the current context" until it suddenly doesn't. In exchange Hugo has image processing, taxonomies, multilingual sites, and Hugo Modules built in, where Jekyll reaches for plugins that GitHub Pages then will not run.

GitHub Pages: Jekyll's home turf, with a catch

GitHub Pages builds Jekyll natively but pins an older 3.x release and a fixed allowlist of plugins, so a modern Jekyll 4 site with a custom plugin needs a GitHub Actions workflow anyway. Once you are writing a workflow file, Hugo is a few lines further, and the build minutes for a blog on the free tier are unmeasurable. That leaves the genuinely zero-config Jekyll case as a plain blog using only the allowed plugins, the only case where I would still pick it. Serving either output yourself is the same job: a Caddy file_server line or any reverse proxy in front of the output directory.

Decision table

What I'd do

Hugo. The Ruby setup tax recurs on every new laptop and every CI runner; the Go template learning curve you pay once. For the question that comes next, Astro vs Hugo covers when you want components instead of a theme, and Zola is the pick if you like Hugo's single-binary model but want a friendlier template language. If you already have a Jekyll site that builds, leave it alone; migrating a working blog for speed you cannot feel is a hobby, not a plan.