Franklin.jl vs Zola
Franklin.jl
franklinjl.orgZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Franklin.jl | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 7.4 (#27) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The project describes straightforward integration with Literate.jl. | The documentation provides deployment guides for Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages. |
| License | The official GitHub repository says Franklin is MIT licensed. | The project states that code introduced after version 0.22 is licensed under EUPL-1.2, while earlier code remains under MIT. |
| Markdown | It extends Markdown with LaTeX-like commands and user-defined div blocks. | Zola uses CommonMark and adds support for footnotes, GitHub-flavored tables, task lists, and strikethrough. |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Product | Franklin is a customizable static site generator written in Julia, oriented toward technical blogging and light, fast-loading pages. | Zola is a static site generator that turns content into static HTML pages. |
| Support | The repository recommends the #franklin channel on Julia Slack for usage questions. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
| Supported languages | Julia | Rust |
| Templates | The newsite function can create a website from a template, and the documentation says templates are starting points that may need adjustments. | Zola uses the Tera template engine, which its documentation compares to Jinja2, Liquid, and Twig. |
Plans
In their own words
Franklin.jl
Franklin.jl has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Zola
Zola is a static site generator that turns Markdown content into static HTML for blogs, knowledge bases and landing pages. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and can also be self-hosted. Distributed as a single executable, it includes Sass compilation and syntax highlighting. Its maker says an average site generates in less than a second, including those steps. Because the output is static files, a published site does not need a database or server to manage. Zola uses CommonMark with added support for footnotes, GitHub-flavored tables, task lists and strikethrough. It uses the Tera template engine and can create multilingual sites with language-specific configuration and content. Users can define taxonomies and generate pages for their terms, such as categories, genres or tags. Search can run without servers or third parties, and indexing is configurable. Deployment guides cover Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages. The plan is free. Windows installation documentation says Zola does not work in PowerShell ISE. Code introduced after version 0.22 is licensed under EUPL-1.2; earlier code remains under MIT.