al-folio vs Academic Pages vs Hugo Blox: which academic template to fork

The short answer

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  Pick al-folio if you want the most features and publications generated from a BibTeX file, and you don't mind keeping a Ruby project up to date. It is the most capable of the three and the most actively developed.

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  Pick Academic Pages if you want the gentlest path. You can do everything in GitHub's web editor, and the template changes slowly, which is a feature when all you want is a site that stays up.

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  Pick Hugo Blox if you already like Hugo, or want fast builds and a large library of page blocks. Go in knowing its history of breaking renames, and that the vendor now sells paid AI plans on top of the free theme.

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  Pick none of them if the word “upgrade” in the sections below makes you tired. There's a section for you at the end.

Side by side

al-folio, the feature-rich one that just rebuilt itself

al-folio has been around since 2016, and it's the template we meet most often among the real academic sites we've reviewed. Three of the six sites in our professor website examples run on it. Its signature feature is publications generated straight from a BibTeX file. Export from your reference manager, commit, and the publications page rebuilds itself. Around that sit a CV built from RenderCV or JSON Resume files, blog posts with math, full-text search, dark mode, and pages for a lab and its people. One developer who moved his own site to al-folio in 2023 found its configuration file “commented super well” and said switching over “took a day of work”.

Then, on June 2, 2026, came v1.0. The release notes call it “a major architecture release”. al-folio moved from one theme repository to a “thin starter + plugin ecosystem”: layouts and features now live in about fifteen separately versioned Ruby gems, and Tailwind replaces the old Bootstrap styling. For a new site, that's good news. The code is modern, and future fixes arrive as version bumps. For an existing site, it means a migration, which is why the project ships its own command-line tool to audit what needs to change. Two more releases followed by August 9.

On a real site: Mayank Mittal, a PhD student at ETH Zurich and a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, runs mayankm96.github.io on al-folio, with news current to April 2026. It shows what the template does best: every paper gets a visual teaser and its links, and the whole thing stays readable. We annotate it in detail among our PhD student website examples.

Academic Pages, the simple one with one maintainer

Academic Pages started as a fork of the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme, extended for the things academics have: publications, talks, teaching, a portfolio, blog posts and a generated CV. It has the most GitHub stars of the three and the gentlest learning curve. You fork it, fill in a configuration file and some Markdown pages, and you never have to leave GitHub's web editor. Publications work differently here. Each paper is its own Markdown file, and the template ships Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks that generate those files from a spreadsheet.

It's also the slowest-moving of the three. Version 0.9 arrived on June 24, 2026, a year after v0.8.4, and the README says the project is “currently being maintained by Robert Zupko, and additional maintainers would be welcome.” Slow isn't bad for a personal site. It means fewer forced migrations. The real cost is one the README states honestly: if you customize the template, “you will probably get merge conflicts” when you try to pull in updates. So most Academic Pages sites simply never update the template at all, which works fine until a dependency breaks.

On a real site: Rob Williams, a political science PhD from UNC Chapel Hill who now works as a data scientist, runs jayrobwilliams.com on Academic Pages, with publications, research, teaching, software and a CV. In 2020 he wrote up how he built it, for readers with “a basic level of coding experience and comfort with Markdown files”. If you know R Markdown, he argues, you already have the skills.

Hugo Blox, the fast one on its third name

Hugo Blox is built on Hugo, a static site generator known for fast builds, and it comes with a long academic feature list: BibTeX and DOI import, Jupyter notebooks published as posts, LaTeX math, Markdown slides, and a visual editor for VS Code. It deploys to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare Pages.

Its history is the part to know before you start. It launched as Hugo Academic, was renamed Wowchemy around 2020, and became Hugo Blox in 2024. The vendor calls the last change “Same project, clearer name”, and old Wowchemy links still redirect. But users found that each rename also moved code. One long-time user who left in March 2026 put it plainly: “Each rename brought breaking changes. Module import paths changed, config file structures were reorganized, template names were updated.” A thread on the official Hugo forum from 2024 shows the cost in practice. A user's Wowchemy site stopped building, and the fix, three months later, was removing the old modules and hand-editing the project's dependency file. Hugo Blox's own migration advice for Wowchemy sites now starts with “Start fresh”.

The theme itself is still free and MIT-licensed. Around it, Hugo Blox now sells AI plans: Plus at $9 a month, Pro at $20 and Max at $50, billed yearly, or $12, $25 and $60 month to month. You don't need them to run a site. It's worth knowing where the project's attention is going.

On a real site: Nicole Paul, an ETH Fellow in structural dynamics and earthquake engineering at ETH Zürich, runs nicolepaul.io on Hugo Blox. Her build write-up is refreshingly concrete. She chose Hugo because she “wanted to maintain my website in a text editor rather than by clicking around on a browser”, hosts for free, and pays only for the domain, $45 a year. Her per-paper rows of PDF, code, data and DOI links are the best thing on the site, and we annotate them among our real academic website examples.

What every template costs after launch

Put the three stories side by side and the pattern is plain. The price of a free template is paid in upgrades. al-folio asks you to migrate to keep up. Academic Pages asks you to accept merge conflicts, or to never update. Hugo Blox has asked some of its users to start over. None of this makes them bad. It makes them software, and software you host yourself is software you maintain yourself.

The other quiet cost is finishing. Setting up a template takes an afternoon. Replacing every piece of placeholder content takes discipline. We came across one live Academic Pages site, a PhD student's, that still shows the template's own description in its browser tab, “academicpages is a ready-to-fork GitHub Pages template for academic personal websites”, with placeholder social links and a 2018 copyright line. It isn't a cautionary tale about that student. It's what happens to most side projects when the semester starts.

When to use none of them

If your research already lives in R or Python notebooks, look at Quarto before any of the three. It publishes notebooks as a site with no separate theme to keep in sync. We cover it alongside the others in our comparison of academic website templates: live demos vs code.

If what you want is a finished site rather than a project, a hosted builder trades some control for never thinking about upgrades again. We compared those honestly, including the ones that beat us, in our guide to academic website builders and your no-code options.

This is the honest place to mention what we make. Scilio skips the template entirely. You add publications and projects in an editor, import them from a BibTeX file or a DOI, and the layout is handled for you. Building and publishing at scilio.app/yourname are free. Where it falls short, at the same standard as the three above: there's no blog, no lab pages and no ORCID import, and you can't edit the code. If you want those, fork al-folio.