Cecil vs Nikola
Cecil
cecil.app
Nikola
getnikola.comSide by side
| Figure | Cecil | Nikola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.8 (#3) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Deployment | The maker documents deployment recipes for platforms including Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and GitLab Pages. | Nikola sites can be hosted on any web server that serves HTML files, and the handbook lists GitHub Pages deployment support. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| License | Cecil is free software distributed under the EUPL-1.2 license. | Nikola is released under the MIT license, while some bundled or required components use other licenses. |
| Product | Cecil is a command-line PHP application that combines Markdown pages, media, and Twig templates to generate static websites. | Nikola is a static site generator that turns content into a website ready to deploy. |
| What it does | Cecil is a PHP command-line static site generator that combines Markdown pages, media, and Twig templates to generate static websites. | Nikola is a static website and blog generator that turns written content into a folder of HTML files for upload to a server. |
Plans
In their own words
Cecil
Cecil is a free command-line PHP application that generates static websites from Markdown pages, media, and Twig templates. It stores content in Markdown files with front matter and supports themes for changing site design. The generator can create pagination, sitemaps, redirects, robots.txt, taxonomies, RSS, and SEO metadata such as Open Graph tags, Twitter cards, and structured data. It can also produce responsive WebP and AVIF images and compress them. Multilingual content and template translation are supported, as is a local preview server. Cecil generates static HTML; its maker says site visits do not require a database or server-side script execution. Installation is documented for macOS, Windows, and Linux, but PHP 8.2 or later is required. Deployment recipes cover services including Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and GitLab Pages. The project is distributed under the EUPL-1.2 license and maintained by Arnaud Ligny. Cecil is free software at free, with no cost or usage limits stated.
Nikola
Nikola is a static site and blog generator that turns written content into HTML files and assets for a web server. It can build blogs, company and personal sites, software project sites, and book sites. Built-in inputs include reStructuredText, Markdown, IPython notebooks, and HTML, with plugins available for additional formats. Blog components include comments, tags, categories, archives, and RSS/Atom feeds; image galleries and code listings are also included. Nikola supports almost 40 languages out of the box, including posts in multiple languages. Sites can be hosted on any web server that serves HTML files, and the handbook lists GitHub Pages deployment. The software is written in Python 3, with Python 3.8 or later listed on the homepage, and is free under the MIT license. Users can extend it with Python plugins and make themes using Mako or Jinja2. Incremental builds use doit. Because generated sites do not run code on the server, they cannot process form input except for comments. Indexed plugins and themes are not officially supported.