What is Zola used for?

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust that ships as one binary with Sass, syntax highlighting, image processing, search and taxonomies built in. It is a good fit for personal blogs and portfolios, documentation sites, and fast static marketing pages.

Yes. Zola is open source under the EUPL-1.2 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at getzola/zola and is written mainly in Rust.

Yes. Zola is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What are some alternatives to Zola?

Similar open-source tools in the CMS category include Hugo, Marmite and Nesta CMS. SaaS products in the same category include BlogBowl, Blogsitefy and CloudCannon.

Is Zola actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Zola was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.23.6, published on 12 September 2026. The project has 17k stars on GitHub.

Zola: open-source CMS

About Zola

Zola is a static site generator distributed as a single Rust binary that includes everything most sites need. It was originally called Gutenberg, uses the Tera template engine, and turns Markdown content and templates into a folder of static files that can be hosted anywhere.

Built-in features include syntax highlighting, Sass compilation, co-location of assets with content, basic multilingual support, image processing, themes, internal links and an external link checker, automatic table of contents and header anchors, aliases, pagination, custom taxonomies, client-side search that needs no server or third party, and live reload while editing. Sites can be deployed easily to platforms such as Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages.

The project contains code under more than one license: code added after version 0.22 is under the EUPL-1.2, while earlier code remains MIT. Documentation lives in the repository and on getzola.org, and there is a community forum. Zola suits developers who want a fast, dependency-free generator for blogs, documentation and portfolio sites.

Key features

Single binary with no dependencies
Sass compilation and syntax highlighting
Image processing and asset co-location
Taxonomies and pagination
Client-side search without a server
Live reload during development

Good fit for

→Personal blogs and portfolios
→Documentation sites
→Fast static marketing pages

Built with: Rust
Tags: static-site-generator; rust; markdown; blog; documentation; sass; cms; jamstack

Zola: questions and answers

What is Zola used for?: Zola is a static site generator written in Rust that ships as one binary with Sass, syntax highlighting, image processing, search and taxonomies built in. It is a good fit for personal blogs and portfolios, documentation sites, and fast static marketing pages.
Is Zola open source?: Yes. Zola is open source under the EUPL-1.2 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at getzola/zola and is written mainly in Rust.
Is Zola free?: Yes. Zola is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What are some alternatives to Zola?: Similar open-source tools in the CMS category include Hugo, Marmite and Nesta CMS. SaaS products in the same category include BlogBowl, Blogsitefy and CloudCannon.
Is Zola actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Zola was on 28 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.23.6, published on 12 September 2026. The project has 17k stars on GitHub.