Hakyll vs Zola
Hakyll
jaspervdj.beZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Hakyll | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| 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 documentation provides deployment guides for Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages. |
| License | Hakyll is available under a BSD license; the maker notes that using Pandoc means site code must use a GPL-compatible license. | The project states that code introduced after version 0.22 is licensed under EUPL-1.2, while earlier code remains under MIT. |
| Preview server | The installation guide describes a watch command that builds and previews the site locally at localhost:8000 when the preview server is included. | Yes |
| Support | The maker points users to a Google discussion group and the #hakyll channel on Libera.Chat for questions. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
| Supported languages | Haskell | Rust |
| Templates | Templates support metadata and context fields, conditionals, partials, and loops over lists. | Zola uses the Tera template engine, which its documentation compares to Jinja2, Liquid, and Twig. |
Plans
In their own words
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.