Publii vs Zola
Publii
getpublii.comZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Publii | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.6 (#8) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Notable limit | The privacy requirements for a published site depend on its configuration, since hosting logs, analytics, forms, embedded media, and external services may still process data. | The Windows installation documentation states that Zola does not work in PowerShell ISE. |
| Product | Publii is a free, open-source desktop CMS that builds static websites locally on your computer. | Zola is a static site generator that turns content into static HTML pages. |
| Support | Publii offers user and developer documentation, a community forum, and dedicated premium support for paid products. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
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.