I have two reasons to choose for Hugo:
- build speed at very large websites (a factor 10)
- the option to process images (scale, crop, etc)
To me the first one is very important. I created a Hugo specific CMS that can deploy a website in under a second (including the build process). The second one is also very important, as I advertise my websites to be instantly loading. That requires a PERFECT optimization of images. Hugo is able to provide that without (expensive) third party tools.
However, there are a lot of reasons NOT to choose for Hugo:
- the complexity of Hugo
- Hugo’s strange scope (filepaths are not considered properly, while AMP pages are)
- Go templating (hard to read and write)
- the need for a build process (Github Pages builds Jekyll natively)
- the fact that Hugo is on 0.something, which allows for breaking changes
- the developer community being smaller
People who use Jekyll generally build faster websites:
Jekyll is awesome!