Hugo vs Zola

Hugo is a free, open-source static site generator that builds sites from Markdown. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, supports multilingual content, and includes a local preview server for development. Its taxonomy system organizes site content, while asset tools cover image processing, JavaScript bundling, and Sass; TailwindCSS is also supported. Hugo is written in Go and distributed under the Apache 2.0 License. The project lists documentation, corporate, government, nonprofit, education, news, event, and project sites among its uses. Large sites often render in seconds. Hugo is actively maintained and has a fast release cycle. The listed supported languages are Go, Ruby, and Python. Hugo is free to use, and its pricing model is listed as free; no price is listed for the Hugo Open Source plan. The listed pricing page returns a page-not-found response.

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.