Author of Zola, who used to have sites in Pelican, here.
Pelican is way more customisable, you can write Python scripts to do whatever you want. The downsides: you need to have a virtualenv and that it is pretty slow (especially syntax highlighting). It is awesome overall though, my favourite after Zola ;)
Zola [0] has a comparison table between Zola, Cobalt, Hugo and Pelican. I tried out Zola because I saw somewhere that it was single binary (had heard of Hugo, but didn't know it was single binary). I moved my blog from Jekyll to Zola as I found a theme I liked.
Ah, that's useful, thank you. I'm also looking for some personal experience, because, for example, while Hugo looks great on paper, its data model and template language frustrated me to no end the one time I tried to make something with it.
Zola is fast and simple, but there is a hard upper bound on what it can do, and the author has no desire to change this. One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS. Zola's author doesn't want a dependency larger than the entire application.
I'm currently using Zola + python/js scripts to do things Zola can't and considering a move to something like Pelican.
> One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS
In practice to use PostCSS, you need npm to install plugins, and maybe a `postcss.config.js`, so there are no advantages of having that PostCSS call in Zola's `config.toml` or as a script in `package.json`.
I don't really see how others SSG would handle that. Hugo just shells out a command to `postcss-cli` that needs to be installed (https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/postcss/), along with whatever plugins you are using. It's not really something "built-in".
