Bridgetown vs Sculpin
Bridgetown
bridgetownrb.comSculpin
sculpin.ioSide by side
| Figure | Bridgetown | Sculpin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.0 (#12) | 7.0 (#34) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Deployment | Static output can be deployed to any server that supports HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; the site recommends Render for full-stack production setups. | Generated production files can be uploaded to a web server, and the deployed site does not use PHP on the server. |
| 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. | The getting-started guide describes deploying generated sites with rsync, GitHub Pages, or Amazon S3, with s3cmd needed for its sample S3 script. |
| License | The Bridgetown source code is licensed under MIT. | The Sculpin GitHub repository identifies the project as MIT licensed. |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The documentation directs users who need help to Bridgetown community channels, including Discord chat. | The maker directs users with questions to the Sculpin community, Discord, and Mastodon. |
| Supported languages | Ruby,JavaScript | PHP |
| What it does | Bridgetown is a Ruby-powered progressive site generator that compiles content, layouts, and components into a website. | Sculpin is a PHP static site generator that converts Markdown files, Twig templates, and standard HTML into static HTML sites. |
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.