Bridgetown vs Pelican
Bridgetown
bridgetownrb.comPelican
getpelican.comSide by side
| Figure | Bridgetown | Pelican |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.0 (#12) | 7.5 (#23) |
| Deployment Options | Static sites can deploy anywhere that supports HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. | The documentation describes deployment using rsync over SSH and publishing through GitHub Pages. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The official plugin directory lists integrations and extensions for Directus, Cloudinary, Notion, Plausible Analytics, Sequel, and Lit SSR plus hydration. | Pelican can interface with version control systems and webhooks. |
| License | The Bridgetown source code is licensed under MIT. | The project repository identifies its license as AGPL-3.0. |
| Support | The documentation directs users who need help to Bridgetown community channels, including Discord chat. | The documentation directs users to its feedback and contribution guidelines for help and feedback. |
| What it does | Bridgetown is a Ruby-powered progressive site generator that compiles content, layouts, and components into a website. | Pelican is a Python static site generator that turns text files into websites without requiring a database or server-side programming. |
In their own words
Bridgetown
Bridgetown is a free site generator for building static sites, full-stack applications or a combination of both. It compiles Markdown, layouts and components into HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Static publishing features include permalinks, Git-based content deployment, atomic builds, data pipelines and pagination. Collections, taxonomies and content relationships organize material, which can be generated at build time or in real time and connected to a headless CMS or other web APIs. For full-stack applications, its Roda backend supports dynamic routes, server APIs and database connections such as PostgreSQL. Templates can use ERB, Serbea, Streamlined or Liquid; components support modular views, web components and Markdown inclusion. The frontend build system includes esbuild and PostCSS, and custom Ruby plugins can extend builds and content. Static output can be deployed anywhere that serves HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Bridgetown supports Ruby and JavaScript, and its setup guides cover macOS, Fedora and Ubuntu Linux, and Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. Installation requires GCC and Make, Ruby 3.3 or newer, and Node 22.21 or newer.