Sculpin vs Zola
Sculpin
sculpin.ioZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Sculpin | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 7.0 (#34) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Hosting | Generated static files can be deployed to any web host. | Zola outputs static files, so generated sites do not require a database or server to manage. |
| Integrations | The getting-started guide describes deploying generated sites with rsync, GitHub Pages, or Amazon S3, with s3cmd needed for its sample S3 script. | The documentation provides deployment guides for Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages. |
| License | The Sculpin GitHub repository identifies the project as MIT licensed. | The project states that code introduced after version 0.22 is licensed under EUPL-1.2, while earlier code remains under MIT. |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The maker directs users with questions to the Sculpin community, Discord, and Mastodon. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
| Supported languages | PHP | Rust |
| Templates | Sculpin uses Twig, which the maker describes as an extensible template engine. | Zola uses the Tera template engine, which its documentation compares to Jinja2, Liquid, and Twig. |
| Use cases | Sculpin can create any type of static website, including blogs. | Zola describes blogs, knowledge bases, and landing pages as examples of sites it can build. |
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.