Jekyll is a great, fast alternative to a traditional CMS for developers
May 11, 2018
Jekyll is a great, fast alternative to a traditional CMS for developers
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Jekyll
At my organization, we currently use Jekyll on my team as an easy way to publish our style guide and pattern library. The Jekyll site gets deployed automatically through GitHub pages. I use Jekyll personally for a portfolio website, also deployed through GitHub Pages. I also have used Netlify for publishing Jekyll sites in the past.
- Content stored in Git with the website code
- Free to use
- Easy to deploy to cheap/free hosting solutions
- Produces super fast static websites
- Not easy to update for non-developers
- No server-side language to support things like contact forms, so 3rd party software/service is needed
- Ruby gems can get messy
- It's free with GitHub Pages, so it cost us nothing to use
- It's tied into GitHub, so deploying changes is super easy (as opposed to deploying elsewhere)
- Keeps all content together with the code, so only one place to maintain information
The big alternatives to Jekyll are of course things like WordPress or Drupal, but they are almost something completely different: a full-blown CMS with a backend language and a database. Jekyll loses some of the niceties of these CMS solutions, like easily updating content from a user interface, but Jekyll will have much better performance by not having to render pages server-side or get content from a database.
I've also looked into (but not tried) several other Jekyll alternatives, such as Hugo, Middleman, and Pelican. Ultimately I decided on Jekyll because of it's ease of use with GitHub.
I've also looked into (but not tried) several other Jekyll alternatives, such as Hugo, Middleman, and Pelican. Ultimately I decided on Jekyll because of it's ease of use with GitHub.