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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

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
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.