Hugo vs Eleventy: Bengaluru Developer's Guide

Choosing between Hugo and Eleventy depends on your project needs. As someone who's deployed both across Bengaluru startup projects, Hugo wins for speed while Eleventy excels in flexibility. Both generate static HTML from Markdown - perfect for Indian blogs covering tech, travel, and culture.

Last monsoon season, I built gaathastory.com podcast site with Eleventy. The incremental builds handled 200+ episodes without breaking a sweat. For mrunalpandit.com redesign, Hugo's single-binary deployment simplified VPS hosting via Caddy server.

Hugo	Eleventy
Lightning build speed (500+ pages/sec)	Flexible templating (Nunjucks, Liquid)
Single binary deployment	Incremental builds
Go-based (compiled)	JavaScript ecosystem
Minimal config	Plugin ecosystem

Recommendation for Indian Developers

Hugo: Documentation sites, company blogs, high-traffic news sites
Eleventy: Personal blogs, podcasts, complex data-driven sites
Both: Cost-effective Netlify/Vercel deployments

Static CM Category Posts

"Static sites aren't going anywhere - they're becoming the default for performance-first development." - Bengaluru Web Meetup 2026