Nikola vs Pelican
Nikola
getnikola.comPelican
getpelican.comSide by side
| Figure | Nikola | Pelican |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.8 (#4) | 7.5 (#23) |
| Spec score · Blogging Platforms | 8.5 (#33) | 7.6 (#85) |
| Builds | Nikola uses doit for incremental rebuilds that rebuild only pages needing changes. | Content caching and selective output writing help speed up rebuilds. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Hosting | A generated Nikola site can be hosted on any web server because it consists of HTML files and assets. | Pelican generates static files that can be served by any web server or hosting service. |
| Integrations | The features page says Nikola can work with static-site CMS solutions including Dato CMS, Netlify CMS, and Contentful. | Pelican can interface with version control systems and webhooks. |
| License | Nikola is released under the MIT license, while some bundled or required components use other licenses. | The project repository identifies its license as AGPL-3.0. |
| Product | Nikola is a static site generator that turns content into a website ready to deploy. | Pelican is a static site generator written in Python that builds websites from text files. |
| Post scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| Site features | Built-in components include blogs with comments, tags, categories, archives and RSS/Atom feeds, plus image galleries and code listings. | Pelican supports articles and pages, themes, multilingual articles, Atom and RSS feeds, and code syntax highlighting. |
| Support | 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. | The documentation directs users to its feedback and contribution guidelines for help and feedback. |
| Theme customization | custom code | custom code |
| What it does | Nikola is a static website and blog generator that turns written content into a folder of HTML files for upload to a server. | Pelican is a Python static site generator that turns text files into websites without requiring a database or server-side programming. |
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.