There are many static site generators, and I have tried many of them, including Pelican and Jekyll. But I have finally settled on my favorite… Hugo!
Pelican was pretty cool, but I never was able to get a theme to look the way I wanted. Jekyll had some awesome templates, but it was a royal pain in the ass getting the Ruby dependencies sorted out. When I upgraded my PC and OS to Ubuntu 16.04, I was completely unable to get Jekyll working again. I finally gave Hugo a try and never looked back.
Hugo provides a single executable without dependencies. It is insanely fast… one of my Jekyll sites might take upwards of 30 seconds to build, whereas Hugo is nearly instant. Hugo does not have nearly the community of Jekyll, but it is growing. And I do find the theming and templating for Hugo to be easy to learn.
Add Yihui Xie’s blogdown package, and Hugo now has support for R Markdown, making Hugo a great static site generator for data analysts wishing to share their work.