Companies Using Hexo

Hexo is old for a static site generator: Tommy Chen started it in 2012, and it became a common blog engine for developers, especially in China. I wanted to know what's left of that today. A domain counts in our crawl when its pages carry Hexo's generator tag, which Hexo prints by default. In our October 2026 crawl that's 1,218 live domains, and when I fetched every homepage on 15 October, 1,055 still showed the tag and 74 didn't answer. Hexo is free and MIT-licensed, so the count is of sites.

Blogs, mostly personal

Hexo sites are rarely company sites. Only 162 of 1,218 domains match a company record, 13.3%, against 38.7% for VitePress and 53.1% for Eleventy on their pages. 130 domains sit on a blog. subdomain, and the rest are mostly someone's own domain with a Hexo theme on it. The companies that do use it are software firms, 48.27% of the matched set, using it for an engineering blog, an API reference or a guide. CKEditor is the exception: its main website, ckeditor.com, runs on Hexo 8.1.

Sales signal: treat Hexo as a developer-audience signal rather than a company list. The 162 matched companies are worth working; the other thousand domains are individuals.

The companies that did pick it

The 162 matched companies are small and mid-aged. 69.93% of the 143 with a known size have 1 to 10 employees, and 63.22% of those with a founding year started in the 2010s, when Hexo was at its most popular; only 10.34% date from the 2020s. The bigger names use it for one job: Avid for its developer portal, Meteor for its guide, Mailshake for its API reference. The Vue team is the neatest case. Its Vue 2 docs at v2.vuejs.org still run on Hexo, while the current Vue docs are built with VitePress, the generator the Vue team makes itself.

Sales signal: the buyer is a developer-relations or docs owner at a small software company, and the site has probably been left alone for years. Documentation tooling and hosted docs platforms fit better than marketing software.

China is the centre of gravity

By matched company the United States leads, 36 to China's 16. By page language it's the other way round: 454 domains serve Chinese-language pages against 374 in English. Baidu Analytics is on 16.35% of Hexo domains, Busuanzi, a Chinese page-view counter, on 7.97%, and comment widgets such as Twikoo on 2.3%. The company match misses these sites because they're personal.

"On a Hexo list the company match tells you about the English-speaking minority. The bigger community is Chinese developers writing personal blogs, and they barely appear in company data." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: for a developer tool with a Chinese-language offer, Hexo's domain list is a ready audience. For a B2B sale, work the 162 matched companies and ignore the rest.

A base that doesn't upgrade

Hexo prints its version, so we can see how current the base is. Of 1,051 homepages showing one, 173 run Hexo 8, which shipped in September 2025, 297 run 7, 219 run 6, and 362, about a third, still run Hexo 5 or older, including 120 on Hexo 3. A blog built once and published from a laptop doesn't get upgraded unless something breaks. The project itself is active: 8.1.0 came out in October 2025 and 8.1.2, the current release, in May 2026.

Sales signal: a third of these sites run versions that are years old, so they're candidates for a rebuild. Anyone selling migration help, hosted blogging or a newer generator has an audience here.

Stable, with no corridor out

Our monthly counts ran 916 in June, then 1,094, 1,188, 1,208 and 1,218 in October. The early steps are our side, the set of domains we crawl turns over every month and our detection widens, so the useful part is the flat line since August. 82 domains dropped Hexo after tracking began in March 2026, 9 of which still run it on another hostname. Our switching tests found no corridor: 10 domains run Hexo and Hugo today, out of 17 ever seen with both, too few to call a move.

"Hexo is holding steady: a settled population of old blogs that stay online." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: there's no exodus to sell into. The pitch is to the blog's owner, about what the blog lacks.

The stack around it

Percentages here are of the 1,217 clean domains we analysed. 36.32% are hosted on GitHub Pages, and Fastly, which serves GitHub Pages traffic, shows on 35.74%; Vercel hosts 9.7% and Netlify 8.63%. jsDelivr (37.22%) and cdnjs (23.17%) serve theme libraries. The themes are visible in the scripts: Font Awesome on 65.57%, jQuery on 56.7%, FancyBox on 24.49% and anime.js on 17.58%. Google Analytics runs on 50.37%; privacy-first counters are rare, Umami at 4.27%. MathJax on 7.89% marks the technical writers.

Sales signal: these sites run on free hosting with free tools. Anything sold here needs a free tier and a Hexo plugin or theme snippet, because that's how this community installs things.

What I'd take away

• 1,218 Hexo domains, 0.09% of static site generators, and a count close to complete, since current versions print the tag by default.
• Mostly personal blogs: only 13.3% match a company, and 454 domains are in Chinese.
• The companies that do use it are software firms using it for blogs, docs and guides; CKEditor runs its whole site on it.
• A third of sites run Hexo 5 or older.
• No migration corridor; the base is flat since August.

How I'd prospect this list

On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for Hexo and a company match, then sort by the hostname: blog., docs. and developer. rows are engineering teams, root domains are usually the whole company site. Open with the version: "Your engineering blog runs Hexo 5, three major versions behind; here's what the upgrade, or a move to our platform, would take." For a competitive angle, the 10 domains running Hexo and Hugo together are teams already maintaining two generators.

The full list of 1,218 Hexo domains and 162 matched companies is on TechnologyChecker.io, with country, size and stack filters.