Jekyll is a great, fast alternative to a traditional CMS for developers
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
- Content stored in Git with the website code
- Free to use
- Easy to deploy to cheap/free hosting solutions
- Produces super fast static websites
Cons
- 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
Likelihood to Recommend
Jekyll is well suited for users who would like to have all content within source control (Git) along with the code used to produce the website. Because everything it produces is static assets (HTML, CSS, etc.), sites created with Jekyll are super fast, with very little needed on the server side of things. There are also a few really great free solutions for deploying and serving Jekyll websites.
Jekyll will be tough to maintain for users who are not web developers, comfortable using Git to update content. There are 3rd party solutions for maintaining Jekyll-based sites without having to touch the code, but this will cost extra money. Also, because there is no server-side language, you will need to look elsewhere to handle things like contact forms.