Statac vs Jekyll

Jekyll is the static site generator that made the idea popular, and the one GitHub Pages builds. It is written in Ruby, and its philosophy says: “If a user’s site builds today, it should build tomorrow.”

Statac is a friendlier static site generator for personal websites. Everything is included, so you can tinker with your site if you want to, but you don’t have to. It is made for the IndieWeb and the social web: feeds, webmentions and social cards are part of it, with no plugins.

At a glance

Where they are alike

• Markdown with YAML front matter, and a post’s date in its file name, which Statac reads too.
• Layouts, and pieces called from the content: Jekyll’s includes, Statac’s snippets.
• Drafts, scheduled posts, tags, data files and Sass.
• Code coloured during the build, with a class on each piece and the colours in a stylesheet. In Statac, set code_colours: true and copy a theme’s colours.
• Feeds, a sitemap and redirects from old URLs: in Jekyll through its team’s plugins, such as jekyll-feed, and in Statac through the site’s own templates and redirect_from.

What Statac does differently

• One program, with nothing else to install, on macOS, Linux and Windows.

• Much of what plugins do for a Jekyll site is part of Statac: pagination for any list, tags and series included, several languages, webmentions, related posts and search.

• Images. Statac publishes each JPEG in the content, and each PNG or WebP that isn’t animated, as AVIF copies in several widths, with a fallback.

• Maths becomes MathML during the build, with no script. Jekyll’s Markdown reader, kramdown, marks maths up for MathJax, by default, a script in the reader’s browser.

• Social cards. Statac draws a social card for each page whose layout asks for one, from a background and a font you supply.

• Problems at the file, the line and the exact text, with a suggestion if there is a good one, and a page for each kind:

  warning  Broken link: nothing is published at `/about-us/`
    content/index.md, line 4
     4 │ Read more [about us](/about-us/).
       │                      ^^^^^^^^^^
    Did you mean `/about/`?
    More: https://statac.dev/e/broken-link/

• Statac checks every name a template uses while it reads the template, and stops the build if a template shows a value that a page doesn’t have.

• Statac checks every link within the site on every build, down to the heading. In Jekyll, the link and post_url tags check the links written with them.

• The debug panel. statac serve adds the debug panel to each page, listing every name a template can write there, its value, and the file and line it comes from.

Why you might choose Jekyll

• GitHub Pages builds it for you, free. Its built-in build runs Jekyll 3.10 with a fixed list of plugins; a GitHub Actions workflow, which GitHub now recommends, runs any version with any plugin. With Statac, you run statac build before you upload, or in a workflow of your own.
• Eighteen years of use. Tutorials, answered questions, themes, and hosts that know it, among them GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify and CloudCannon. Statac was first released on 10 October 2026, and has one maintainer.
• Plugins in Ruby: generators, converters, commands, tags, filters and hooks. Statac has no plugins, by design; its hooks run a command before or after the build.
• Themes, packaged as gems. A new site uses Minima, and can override any of its files. Statac writes no templates into a site; the drop-ins have some to copy.
• Liquid, the template language Shopify made, which many developers already know.
• jekyll-import brings a site across from WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Ghost, Medium, Drupal and more than twenty others. statac import reads other static site generators.
• Collections for any kind of document, and data files in YAML, JSON, CSV or TSV. Statac reads data files in YAML or JSON.
• Line numbers. Jekyll’s highlight tag numbers a code block’s lines and can mark chosen ones. Statac leaves this to a library in the browser.

Statac also checks no links to other sites, minifies nothing, bundles no JavaScript, and writes each redirect as an HTML page, not in a host’s redirect file.

Moving from Jekyll

From Jekyll lists what statac import reads from a Jekyll site. The import keeps or redirects every old URL it can, /page2/ and the like included, and its report lists any it can’t. Each post keeps the id that jekyll-feed gave it, so feed readers don’t show old posts as new.

Versions compared

Checked on 26 October 2026, against Statac 0.7.0 and Jekyll 4.4.1 (29 January 2025), from Jekyll’s documentation. A later release of either may change what this page says.