Toucan vs Zola
Toucan
toucansites.comZola
getzola.orgSide by side
| Figure | Toucan | Zola |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 7.7 (#20) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Hosting | Toucan says sites can be hosted for free on GitHub Pages. | Zola outputs static files, so generated sites do not require a database or server to manage. |
| Multilingual support | Yes | Yes |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Toucan's contact page invites questions about the generator and inquiries from people looking to build a website with it. | The maker links to documentation and a community forum for help. |
| Supported languages | Swift | Rust |
| Templates | The official starter templates include options for documentation sites and blogs, with features such as guide navigation, article search, and customization. | Zola uses the Tera template engine, which its documentation compares to Jinja2, Liquid, and Twig. |
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.