zola (né Gutenberg)

A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in.

Documentation is available on its site or in the docs/content folder of the repository and the community can use its forum.

Comparisons with other static site generators

	Zola	Cobalt	Hugo	Pelican
Single binary
Language	Rust	Rust	Go	Python
Syntax highlighting
Sass compilation
Assets co-location
Multilingual site
Image processing
Sane & powerful template engine
Themes
Shortcodes
Internal links
Link checker
Table of contents
Automatic header anchors
Aliases
Pagination
Custom taxonomies
Search
Data files
LiveReload
Netlify support
Breadcrumbs
Custom output formats

Supported content formats

• Zola: markdown
• Cobalt: markdown
• Hugo: markdown, asciidoc, org-mode
• Pelican: reStructuredText, markdown, asciidoc, org-mode, whatever-you-want

Template engine explanation

Cobalt gets because, while based on Liquid, the Rust library doesn't implement all its features and there is no documentation on what is and isn't implemented; the errors are cryptic; and Liquid itself is not powerful enough to do some of things you can do in Jinja2, Go templates, or Tera.

Hugo gets because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list, after Jinja2, it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased.

Pelican notes

Many features of Pelican are coming from plugins, which might be tricky to use because of version mismatch or lacking documentation. Netlify supports Python and Pipenv but you still need to install your dependencies manually.