Nikola vs Roq

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.

Roq is a free, open-source static site generator built with Java and Quarkus. It creates websites and blogs from Markdown and outputs static files for GitHub Pages, Netlify, or another static server. The project is aimed at AI users and coders, including developers who want zero configuration with customization in Java. Development mode provides a local preview server and live reload, while a browser WYSIWYG editor supports content editing and previewing. Markdown works by default, with plugins for AsciiDoc, tagging, search, diagrams, series, and sitemaps. The default theme includes a blog layout, dark mode, sidebar navigation, responsive design, and social links. Roq bundles CSS, JavaScript, and web assets with esbuild and can use npm packages through mvnpm without Node.js. A GitHub Action supports publishing, and GitLab CI is documented. The CLI installs through JBang on Linux, macOS, and Windows.