Jekyll
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 10 static site generators by recommenders
Simple static site generator that turns Markdown into pages people find secure, easy to host and low-maintenance. Common caveat: complex templates and breaking updates.
Simple static site generator that turns Markdown into pages people find secure, easy to host and low-maintenance. Common caveat: complex templates and breaking updates.
43 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 29
- criticize it
- 14
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 10 years
Median of the 5 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 29 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Static pages with no security risk
“the best security would be no dynamic code at all, just static pages generated by Jekyll”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “EmDash – a spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security” “Super fast load times, zero security issues to worry about, zero dependencies.”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” “static sites are unhackable, require no maintenance and are free to host”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” Stable and low-maintenance once set up
“It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else.”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “The End of Eleventy” “Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “The End of Eleventy” “I wish all software required this little attention!”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “The End of Eleventy” - Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo”
Markdown files that deploy anywhere
“It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere.”
Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “A simple web we own” “it’s easy to deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services”
Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “Publish (On Your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” Good fit for blogs
“now I'm on Jekyll and much happier with my blogging experience”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo” “found Jekyll the most flexible/enjoyable for my use case”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Bloggers, how do you manage your content?” “it's dead simple out of the box in Jekyll”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” - Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)”
- Comment from 13 Jan 2026 in “How to Make a Damn Website”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Complex setup and limiting templates
“Terrible user experience for someone who just wants to use the generator to generate a website vs. to tinker with it as a hobby.”
Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo” “Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” “Their setup is so much more complicated and limiting than what they had on Wordpress.”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” - Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “The End of Eleventy”
Slow builds
“Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast.”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)” “Github Pages ruby-based Jekyll+Liquid, which is unusably slow on iOS without JIT”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Liquid-rust: Liquid templating for Rust” “significantly faster than Jekyll which makes iterating much more pleasant”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo” - Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “A static site generator written in POSIX shell”
- Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Cobalt: static blogging on iPhone and iPad via iSH, with Rust Liquid templates”
Breaking updates and compatibility problems
“it's quite slow, and new versions often introduce breaking changes”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “A static site generator written in POSIX shell” “At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “The End of Eleventy” “dealing with Jekyll updates was sometimes a headache”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo” - Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die”
- Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo”
Other static site generators people recommend
The four most recommended other static site generators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astro | 174 | 36 | 83% | 13 | 2 yrs9 owners | Approved |
| Hugo static site generator | 85 | 40 | 68% | 12 | 3.5 yrs9 owners | Approved |
| JekyllThis page | 29 | 14 | 67% | 7 | 10 yrs5 owners | Approved |
| Eleventy | 22 | 3 | 88% | 6 | 3 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| Zensical | 17 | 4 | 81% | 4 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 48 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!)”
“start with something more low-level and barebones like a static site generator (Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.)”
“I've had a lot of success with jekyll.”
“While it still does the job”
“No support for Liquid 5.x (see GitHub issue #8535)”
“There's no reason Jekyll's server has to run on the editor's local machine.”
“I wish all software required this little attention!”
“I generally do not like Jekyll. I especially find the template system very limiting.”
“At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest”
“Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain”
“This has been built into Jekyll for years.”
“It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else.”
“Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast.”
“static sites are unhackable, require no maintenance and are free to host”
“I love the idea and design”
“it's anything but an over-engineered system”
“Super fast load times, zero security issues to worry about, zero dependencies.”
“it's dead simple out of the box in Jekyll”
“it's my go-to static site generator”
“Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming”
“Their setup is so much more complicated and limiting than what they had on Wordpress.”
“the best security would be no dynamic code at all, just static pages generated by Jekyll”
“I'm not worried about using an old version of Hugo or Jekyll”
“It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere.”
“it's quite slow, and new versions often introduce breaking changes”
“For GitHub just use Jekyll provided by GitHub itself?”
“They are extremely simple, without the bells and whistles of Astro.”
“I haven't found a simple static site generator that isn't Jekyll”
“Jekyll is useful for that”
“Jekyll has been relatively stable recently.”
“Terrible user experience for someone who just wants to use the generator to generate a website vs. to tinker with it as a hobby.”
“now I'm on Jekyll and much happier with my blogging experience”
“I'm using Jekyll and been happy with it.”
“dealing with Jekyll updates was sometimes a headache”
“some update along the way broke everything”
“significantly faster than Jekyll which makes iterating much more pleasant”
“it’s easy to deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services”
“found Jekyll the most flexible/enjoyable for my use case”
“Github Pages ruby-based Jekyll+Liquid, which is unusably slow on iOS without JIT”
“Jekyll is too slow to run on iSH”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.