Bridgetown vs Toucan
Bridgetown
bridgetownrb.comToucan
toucansites.comSide by side
| Figure | Bridgetown | Toucan |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.0 (#12) | 7.7 (#20) |
| CMS integration | Yes | Yes |
| 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. | Toucan's deployment guide covers publishing a Toucan-based static site with GitHub Pages. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Multilingual support | Yes | Yes |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Security | The plugins directory lists a plugin that adds a Content Security Policy in a meta tag. | The documentation says static HTML served by a simple file server can provide faster load times and better security than pages generated dynamically for each request. |
| Support | The documentation directs users who need help to Bridgetown community channels, including Discord chat. | Toucan's contact page invites questions about the generator and inquiries from people looking to build a website with it. |
| Supported languages | Ruby,JavaScript | Swift |
| What it does | Bridgetown is a Ruby-powered progressive site generator that compiles content, layouts, and components into a website. | Toucan is a Markdown-based static site generator written in Swift. |
Plans
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.