Bear Vs Pelican
Bear Blog vs Pelican
I have been using Bear Blog for my creative writing persona and Pelican for my programmer persona for a while now and I thought I would give a little bit of a comparison of the two. In particular, I want to focus on how each handles scheduling future posts because I have to do that for both platforms today.
TLDR
Both platforms are really simple and handle future posts using almost identical methodology. But Pelican requires additional scripting to make future posting automated.
Pelican
Pelican is a Python based static site generator. It doesn’t use a database; everything is done using markdown files. This platform is completely self hosted and fully managed by the owner of the blog. The Pelican documentation has been wonderful and setting up the site was relatively quick and easy. You can refer to my other Pelican blogs for more information:
Learning Pelican Pelican Theming Pelican RSS and Icons
Pelican handles future posting really easily. In the markdown for the future post, you just need to add the Date metadata tag at the top of the document and set it to any future date that you need: Date: 2026-08-10
Once published, Pelican will hide the post till the specified date. Now the downfall here is that Pelican will not automatically regenerate the static content. You as the owner have to go in and regenerate the Pelican content or set up an automatic script to do so. I am going to add a daily cronjob to my server because I feel like there is no point in scheduling a post if I need to manually restart that service.
Bear Blog
From what I have figured out, Bear Blog is also Python but built on Django. This platform also uses markdown files for writing blog posts and pages. However, Bear Blog is maintained and hosted by Herman Martinus. This service is free to use, but there are a lot of features that I would like to use behind a paywall. Herman needs to pay for infrastructure to host this for everyone, and I hope to be able to pay one day.
I have had a hard time with the documentation on this platform, but I may not have given it the time yet. I always seem to have “more important” things to do, but I am using the docs for this post.
This page in the docs covers the meta data that can be placed into a post. Bear Blog is almost exactly the same as Pelican for future posting. To post into the future, you need to add published_date: 2026-08-10 to the top of the markdown file. The difference is that Bear will automatically show the post once the date has passed and requires no further input from anyone.
Conclusion
I currently like both platforms and am going to continue using both. I would like to buy a Bear subscription though to get access to more of the good features.
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.