Jekyll was the default developer blogging tool for most of the last decade, and its one enduring advantage hasn't gone away: GitHub Pages builds Jekyll sites automatically, for free, with zero configuration beyond a repo. That's still a legitimate reason to pick it in 2026. The rest of the comparison is less flattering.
For the wider field of options, see best developer blogging platforms.
What Jekyll gets right
Write Markdown with YAML frontmatter, organize posts in _posts/, and Jekyll's Liquid templating turns it into a static site. If you push to a GitHub Pages-configured repo, GitHub builds it for you — no local build step required for the simplest setups, no separate hosting to configure.
The templating model is straightforward once learned, and the ecosystem, while less active than it once was, still has plugins covering most common needs.
Where it costs you
Those plugins are the catch: jekyll-feed for RSS, jekyll-sitemap for a sitemap, jekyll-seo-tag for meta tags — all things Hugo generates by default, but in Jekyll are dependencies you add, configure, and keep compatible with your Jekyll and Ruby version. Ruby dependency management via Bundler is its own recurring source of friction — version mismatches between your local machine and GitHub Pages' build environment are a common, annoying class of bug.
There's no OG image generation built in or via a mainstream plugin — that's a manual or custom-scripted addition, covered generally in how to add OG images. And build times, while fine for a personal blog, scale noticeably worse than Hugo's as post count grows.
Where Blogizi differs
Blogizi removes the plugin layer and the Ruby toolchain entirely. Sitemaps, per-post OG images, and canonical URLs are handled automatically per project rather than configured through plugins — see the technical SEO checklist. Publishing is blogizi publish path/to/post.md, with no build step and no dependency on GitHub Pages' build environment matching yours. See blogging from your terminal for the full workflow.
The actual decision
Pick Jekyll if: you specifically want the zero-cost, zero-config GitHub Pages integration and don't mind the Ruby/Bundler dependency management and plugin setup that come with it. See GitHub Pages vs Blogizi for that hosting decision in more depth.
Pick Blogizi if: you want the SEO plumbing Jekyll leaves to plugins — RSS, sitemap, OG images — working automatically, without a Ruby toolchain or a build step between writing and publishing.