Hexo

Hexo calls itself "a fast, simple & powerful blog framework" rather than a static site generator — a Node.js tool aimed squarely at blogging, where every other generator in this spoke positions itself as general-purpose.

MIT, TypeScript, 41,768★, created September 2012, pushed 2026-08-29, latest v8.1.2 (6 May 2026), 74 open issues. By stars it is the most popular generator in this spoke — more than Astro, Hugo or Jekyll — and it has never appeared in the corpus until now.

How it works

• Speed as the headline: "Incredible generating speed powered by Node.js. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build." Note the unit — hundreds of files in seconds, where Zola promises a whole site under a second and Hugo counts milliseconds per page. Hexo's claim is the weakest of the three and the only one stated without a benchmark.
• Templating: EJS, Pug or Nunjucks, plus npm tooling (Babel, PostCSS, Less/Sass).
• Content: "All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported, including most Octopress plugins" — GFM, not bare CommonMark, and the Octopress compatibility dates the project precisely.
• Themes: 450 listed.
• Deployment: "One-Command Deployment" to GitHub Pages and Heroku.

The fork count

Checked via the GitHub API on 2026-09-02: 41,768 stars, 786 watchers, and 39 forks. The network_count field agrees at 39, so it is not a display quirk in one field.

For scale, the other three generators hunted the same day: Pelican 7.3 stars per fork, Bridgetown 10.3, Publii 15.6. Hexo is at 1,071 stars per fork, two orders of magnitude off.

No explanation is offered here, because none was found. A fork count can drop through repository transfer, deletion of forked networks, or GitHub-side cleanup, and nothing in the repo or the site says which if any applies. It is recorded because a fork count is one of the few contribution proxies this spoke uses and this is the clearest case yet of one of those numbers not meaning what it usually means.

Related

static-site-generator · jekyll · astro · eleventy · zola · hugo · pelican · bridgetown · publii