Grav vs Halo
Grav and Halo are both CMS software. Grav is open source under MIT, with 16k GitHub stars. Halo is open source under GPL-3.0, with 40k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Grav when
- You need a small to medium website without a database and like content in files.
- Pick Halo when
- You want a WordPress-style site builder with a strong Chinese community and plugin market.
Side by side
A flat-file PHP CMS that stores pages as Markdown files, with Twig themes, plugins and an optional admin panel.
A Java website builder and CMS for blogs, knowledge bases, company sites and small shops, with themes and plugins.
Plugin quality varies, and large sites become slow without care.
Documentation and plugins are mostly Chinese, and some plugins and themes are paid.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server (both)
PHP, Twig and Symfony
Java, Spring Boot, TypeScript and Vue
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
16k GitHub stars
40k GitHub stars
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release 2.2.22.
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v2.27.2.
Other comparisons
More content management systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.