Hakyll vs Nikola
Hakyll
jaspervdj.be
Nikola
getnikola.comSide by side
| Figure | Hakyll | Nikola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 7.5 (#24) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The official site describes Pandoc integration and lists utility projects for Agda, Sass, Elm, hyphenation, and converting from other blog engines. | The features page says Nikola can work with static-site CMS solutions including Dato CMS, Netlify CMS, and Contentful. |
| License | Hakyll is available under a BSD license; the maker notes that using Pandoc means site code must use a GPL-compatible license. | Nikola is released under the MIT license, while some bundled or required components use other licenses. |
| Notable limitation | The FAQ says incremental builds do not detect edits to site.hs, so the configuration must be recompiled before running rebuild. | Because Nikola sites do not run code on the server, they cannot process user input in forms, except for comments. |
| Support | The maker points users to a Google discussion group and the #hakyll channel on Libera.Chat for questions. | The project directs users to GitHub Discussions, a Libera.Chat IRC channel, and GitHub Issues for bug reports; indexed plugins and themes are not officially supported. |
Plans
In their own words
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.