Hello, friends

Has anyone used Publii before?

I stumbled across it recently when searching for alternatives to WordPress.

Some of the showcase sites are impressive: domagic | Ridvan Maulana | Kamil Porembinski

It claims to be easy to use, performant and secure. Is it?

I've had a play with the desktop app and setting up a quick test website, having everything locally definitely speeds things up.

Their challenge is competing with the monster that is WordPress, and all the 3rd party plug-ins/themes available with that.

Just playing around with Publii for an hour or so, I found myself bumping in to limitations with my own dev skills, and thinking "shame there's no extension for that..." quite a lot.

Good luck to them though, I love the idea behind it all.

As already suggested, it's going to struggle against the hundreds of existing CMS. I'm sure there will be some that will use it but it's really just a blog platform. There is no option to create pages. Which means it's useless for most site.

There are loads of other issues with the the UI. One simple example is the hero image. There appears to be no option to disable this. and you need to be quite well informed to understand the terminology. How many people will even know what 80vh means.

Yes — Publii is a solid static CMS and works well as a lightweight WordPress alternative.

Pros:

Very fast (static HTML, no database)

Secure by default

Easy desktop-based editor

Great for blogs, portfolios, and small sites

Cons:

Limited dynamic features

Smaller ecosystem than WordPress

Needs third-party tools for forms, comments, search

Best for: Simple, content-focused sites where performance and security matter.
Not ideal for: eCommerce or complex, highly dynamic websites.