Middleman vs Zola
Middleman
middlemanapp.comZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Middleman | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 7.5 (#26) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Multilingual support | Yes | Yes |
| Notable limit | The Rails Asset Pipeline was removed from Middleman v4 core, and its future is described as uncertain pending community maintainers. | The Windows installation documentation states that Zola does not work in PowerShell ISE. |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Product | Middleman is a static site generator built as an easy-to-use framework for building websites. | Zola is a static site generator that turns content into static HTML pages. |
| Support | The maker offers paid consultation and development, including code reviews, team education, custom extension development, and project architecture planning. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
| Supported languages | Ruby | Rust |
| Templates | Middleman ships with ERB, Haml, Sass, SCSS, and CoffeeScript template engines, and supports more through Tilt-enabled gems. | Zola uses the Tera template engine, which its documentation compares to Jinja2, Liquid, and Twig. |
Plans
In their own words
Middleman
Middleman 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.