Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Jekyll

Jekyll

Overview

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.

Read more
Recent Reviews
Read all reviews
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
N/A
Unavailable

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

3 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

What is Square Online?

Square Online (formerly Weebly) is a basic content management system with blogging and eCommerce features. It can be utilized for building standard websites or specialized webpages for online stores.

What is Duda?

Duda, the eponymous platform from the company in Palo Alto, is a web design platform for companies that offer web design services to small businesses. The company serves customers from freelance web professionals to digital agencies, all the way up to the large hosting companies, SaaS platforms and…

Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(9)

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
  • 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.
Kyle Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Jekyll as a basic content management system framework for building basic, static, (and mostly freely hosted) websites. Generally the websites are either small prototypes, landing pages for new products or something new we're launching, or even as a basic blogging platform for one of our community driven technology sites. Jekyll helps you get up and running very quickly with a bare bones blog enabled site.
  • Lightweight blogging framework
  • Lots of support documentation
  • Can host practically anywhere
  • Complicated for non-technical users
  • Can be difficult to enter in new content
  • Implementing dynamic components can be challenging
Jekyll is perfect for building MVP websites as a way to prototype new projects, products, or landing pages. It is also great for technically savvy individuals who want to start a personal blog or portfolio website without dealing with the security of a server or databases. It can be challenging to pick up, but is very effective when you need it.
  • Jekyll has improved our time to market in cases of new projects
  • Jekyll has reduced the cost of hosting a website
Jekyll has a much lower technical overhead in terms of server and hosting requirements to launch a site, but at the same time has a much more technical "interface" and doesn't have the dynamic capability, user management, or permission system as a standard CMS like Drupal or WordPress already has baked in.
Nathan Arthur | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used Jekyll at two previous organizations. The first was a non-profit college where I used Jekyll to keep costs down. The second was a small web development firm where I used Jekyll to speed development of the company's portfolio website. Jekyll is great for both purposes. Jekyll allowed me to keep costs low for the college I worked for by hosting it for free on GitHub.com along with a custom domain. Jekyll allowed me to speed development at the web firm by allowing me to work very close to the front-end technologies I'm expert in, without having to fiddle with other people's layers in between. The other advantage we reaped at the web firm was how easy it is to build a screaming-fast Jekyll website, since the entire site ends up as a static site, which is great for a website meant to show off your web development skill.
  • Jekyll is a joy to use for people who aren't intimidated by HTML, CSS, and Markdown. It gets out of your way, giving you the power to build a website that would be a pain to build in straight HTML, but without imposing the needless complexity so many other CMS's bolt on.
  • Jekyll sites tend to be extremely fast, and can be made even faster with very little effort on the webmaster's part. All you're serving are static assets.
  • A big advantage of Jekyll is the ability to check in your entire site, content and all, into version control. You never have to worry about upgrading your site and losing your content. It's all backed up in GitHub, or any other git hosting you choose to use.
  • Jekyll sites can be run at near-zero costs. Host it for free on GitHub Pages, and the only expense you have left is a domain name, about $10 a year.
  • You can do most things with Jekyll you'd think would require a database and CMS. Blogging comes built in. Comments, contact forms, and many other common features can be embedded into your site from another service. With a little clever programming, most sites really don't need the complexity and speed impediments of a database.
  • Straight out of the box, Jekyll lacks a friendly WordPress-style back-end. You'll be working in Liquid (HTML), Sass (CSS), and Markdown (content) files. If you're already comfortable with these languages, you'll feel at home in no time. If not, you may need to consider getting someone else's expertise to set up the site, and then use another back-end (probably paid) to make editing your site's files less intimidating.
  • If you use GitHub Pages for the free hosting, be forewarned that GitHub only white lists a few plugins for their own compilation. This usually isn't a problem (you can compile on your own computer if need be), but can be annoying at times.
Jekyll is great for people who aren't intimidated by editing HTML, CSS, and Markdown files, people who are on a shoestring budget, and people who want a blazing fast website. Jekyll may not be the best option for people who aren't interested in editing their websites in a text file and would rather have a WordPress-esque back-end from the beginning.
  • Jekyll has kept our costs low, very low, on all the projects I've used on it. Think $10 a year low.
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code editor, Jekyll will probably feel like a breath of fresh air to you.
Eric Mann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Jekyll is used as the static site generator for project documentation, user guides, and developer best practices explanations. We're using it both through GitHub's built-in Pages feature (which compiles Jekyll sites for us automatically) and locally for content and design staging before anything ever ships to production. Jekyll allows us to work on the content of a documentation site independent of the code that builds and hosts the content.
  • Static site generation
  • Dynamic templates
  • Single-page applications
  • Advanced, multi-page navigation and organization with template hierarchy
  • Ease of local usage (Ruby isn't always the friendliest environment, especially on Windows)
  • Up-to-date documentation on configuration for edge cases and plugins
Jekyll is very well-suited for static content that changes infrequently once it's been published. If the site is a blog or needs to generate dynamic content in response to requests (i.e. form builders or other dynamically-generated pages) a more interactive system would be preferable. Jekyll works best with a hosted solution like GitHub Pages or Elastic Beanstalk or something else where code/content can be deployed once, quickly, and left alone.
  • All of our documentation is now centralized to one, version controlled location and presented seamlessly. Engineers don't have to spend hours trolling through a wiki or sorting Google Pages to find the information they need.
  • Because Jekyll sites are fully-fledged websites, sometimes the _design_ of a document can overwhelm the interest of the team maintaining it - they'll spend more time perfecting the look/feel than they should.
Jekyll is integrated into GitHub Pages, which made it an easy choice. Using Jekyll was also easier as there's not really a server or a database to configure and you can just get things started from day one. Running and verifying content changes locally for developers is super efficient as Jekyll runs locally, too.
Return to navigation