Pelican

Pelican is the static site generator for Python developers who want to blog without leaving their ecosystem. Markdown or reStructuredText in, static HTML out. No JavaScript frameworks, no build toolchains, no node_modules folder. Just Python.

If you're a Python developer who wants a simple blog or documentation site, Pelican is the comfortable choice. Hugo is dramatically faster at build time (Go-based) and has more themes. Jekyll is the Ruby-based original that GitHub Pages supports natively. MkDocs is the Python option specifically optimized for documentation. Commercially, WordPress and Ghost offer hosted blogging without any static site generation.

The plugin ecosystem covers SEO, sitemaps, feeds, and Jupyter notebook rendering. The Jinja2 templating is familiar to Flask and Django developers.

The catch: it's AGPL-licensed, which is unusual for a static site generator and may matter if you're distributing or modifying it. The theme selection is thin compared to Hugo or Jekyll. Build times don't scale well for large sites. And the community has slowed — Hugo and Astro have captured the momentum. For a new blog in 2026, Hugo or Astro will serve you better unless Python-only is a hard requirement.