The table indicates both as being "fast" so that leaves jekyll compatibility as the primary differentiating factor.
Not familiar with jekyll, so cant tell what sort of pool of users that compatibility promise applies to.
But here is a tip: the weak point of hugo is its documentation ;-)
{{ if (and (or (isset .Params "title") (isset .Params "caption")) (isset .Params "attr")) }}Does anyone know why the templating situation is the way it is in go? In many other languages you have multiple competing templating languages, but in go this is basically what you get. Are there language specific features that make it hard?
EDIT: interesting to final see active liquid templating engines for go. now if only legacy would allow for the use of these things.
My opinion is that helm does the completely wrong thing: patching text. It should instead patch objects, so that we don’t have to deal with indentation and other silly things.
I don’t think it’ll ever change though :(
I guess one of the few places that text templates can provide value is when the template is untrusted. But maybe a sandboxed programming language is still a better option here.
You are only able to only use partials in HTML pages and shortcodes in Markdown pages. Why? They use 2 different syntax, so the best you can do is awkwardly wrap a partial in a shortcode. What's the point? They serve basically the same purpose.
Want to set up RSS? Oh yeah, for some reason by default it will not show full content in your feed reader, instead only a small extract. The the only way to fix it is by making your own template[1]. But wait, why are we using RSS instead of Atom? Who knows, but if you want to use Atom, you have to use your template and insert some stuff to your config.
Also don't look at the bug tracker, that thing is frustrates me to no end.
You of course have the everyone's favourite Stalebot that you might have noticed in my previous link, but if you look at older issues, you will see the maintainer self-botting as a Stalebot[2][3] for some reason.
You will also see the maintainer moving issues between milestones for years with no end in sight[4]. That's not a one-off, click on any issue.
Changelogs can sometimes feel a bit, odd too:
> but also a big shoutout to @dependabot[bot], […] for their ongoing contributions.
And commit messages sometimes are just… a bit too long[5] (it is truncated by GitHub, you can append .patch to see the full message).
Their documentation is awful to read too[6]. Oh and the templating engine? Yeah, not documented at all. Also the quick start guide will tell you to git clone some random theme, but I don't want my website to look like someone's, I want to write my own styles and have my own structure, but they don't really tell you anywhere how you should go about it. Because of it, I would search GitHub to sometimes find answers on how to do some stuff, but you would quickly find that most people had no idea how to actually use it. For example you can find a lot of people making opening and ending partials to have a common page layout instead of actually using the built-in Hugo layouts.
So why have I bothered switching? i18n support, so far out of all SSG I tried, Hugo does it in the least painful way.
[1]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/4071
[2]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/385#issuecomment-283...
[3]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/1035#issuecomment-28...
[4]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448
[5]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commit/6dbde8d731f221b027c0...
My blog's migration anno took only a few days, including a template creation from scratch. My template is still unfinished unfortunately, as Hugo was missing features I needed for my vision back then, and since then I gave up a bit on blogging because of the papercuts mentioned, and the immense timesink that is creating reasonable quality content for publishing. (I do paper-based journalling mostly nowadays since then).
Recently just reviewed the Hugo changelogs since the version I use, and now it knows everything I need to finish up my blog (especially features around images and internationalization were missing, since my blog is not in English, and Hugo used to miss a lot for tiny stuff supporting non-english sites properly, eg. date string localization, sorting for localized tags, like the 'abc' in my language starts as 'aábc', but á got sorted after Z (yes, capiztal Z) if I recall correctly, making localized tags hard to use.). I had some hacks for some in place, but it was tiresome. Now Hugo has all the bells and whistles I need, even more than enough... It is hard to wrap my head around the plethora of features and new concepts. I wonder if the docs cover my usecases, or I'll need to do some Sherlock Holmes stuff once again, to get going...
So the takeaway of this rambling? Hugo is great, it is fast, and by now it probably knows everything one can reasonably need. But man, it is hard to learn, it has become a huge topic, as sitebuilding naturally has its depths, just like any other topic, once real life problems are to be solved with it. The docs? Not great, not terrible. Overall I still recommend it over anything else, as the docs are still okayish for basic stuff. I like it, it is a great project. I love that almost every changelog includes that it got faster a little bit. Atypical for current software project. And it is fast indeed. (experience from a 5 year old release) I have worked with some trendy javascript based web authoring tools at workplace, and man they were all sluggish and had way worse developer experience than Hugo, also their docs weren't better at all. (has nothing to with Js apart from being popular nowadays)
I gave up on this ever being fixed quite a while back, but still check on the issue [1] every now and then. Seems like the only activity these days is bep bumping the milestone every month.