Hugo vs DocFX

Hugo and DocFX are both open source static site generators. Hugo is written in Go and DocFX is written in C#.

Property Hugo DocFX
Language Go C#
Templates Go Mustache, Liquid
License Apache-2.0 MIT

Hugo benefits

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website.

Hugo makes use of Markdown files with front matter for meta data.

A typical website of moderate size can be rendered in a fraction of a second. A good rule of thumb is that Hugo takes around 1 millisecond for each piece of content.

It is written to work well with any kind of website including blogs, tumbles and docs.

DocFX benefits

DocFX is an API documentation generator for .NET, and currently it supports C# and VB. It generates API reference documentation from triple-slash comments in your source code. It also allows you to use Markdown files to create additional topics such as tutorials and how-tos, and to customize the generated reference documentation. DocFX builds a static HTML website from your source code and Markdown files, which can be easily hosted on any web servers (for example, github.io). Also, DocFX provides you the flexibility to customize the layout and style of your website through templates. If you are interested in creating your own website with your own styles, you can follow how to create custom template to create custom templates.

DocFX also has the following cool features:

  • Integration with your source code. You can click "View Source" on an API to navigate to the source code in GitHub (your source code must be pushed to GitHub).
  • Cross-platform support. We have exe version that runs under Windows. It can also runs cross platforms on Linux/macOS with Mono.
  • Integration with Visual Studio. You can seamlessly use DocFX within Visual Studio with Install-Package docfx.console
  • Markdown extensions. We introduced DocFX Flavored Markdown(DFM) to help you write API documentation. DFM is 100% compatible with GitHub Flavored Markdown(GFM) with some useful extensions, like file inclusion, code snippet, cross reference, and yaml header. For detailed description about DFM, please refer to DFM.
  • VSCode integration. Install docfx extension in vscode to preview the content in real-time.