Cecil vs Pelican
Cecil
cecil.appPelican
getpelican.comSide by side
| Figure | Cecil | Pelican |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.8 (#3) | 7.5 (#23) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Installation | Cecil can be downloaded as a PHAR file and installed globally through Homebrew on macOS, Scoop on Windows, PHIVE, or a manual Linux command. | The installation documentation lists Linux, macOS, and Windows as supported client operating systems. |
| License | Cecil is free software distributed under the EUPL-1.2 license. | The project repository identifies its license as AGPL-3.0. |
| Product | Cecil is a command-line PHP application that combines Markdown pages, media, and Twig templates to generate static websites. | Pelican is a static site generator written in Python that builds websites from text files. |
| What it does | Cecil is a PHP command-line static site generator that combines Markdown pages, media, and Twig templates to generate static websites. | Pelican is a Python static site generator that turns text files into websites without requiring a database or server-side programming. |
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.