What themes and extensions does Publii offer, and is everything free?

Publii ships with professionally designed, hand-coded themes and lets you extend a site with the tools and services you already use. The CMS itself is described on getpublii.com as free and open-source, and the site also carries a "premium" signal, so the safe reading is: the core is free, while some themes or add-ons may sit behind a paid tier. Which specific themes and extensions are free versus premium is not itemized in the available page evidence — check the official theme and plugin listings before you commit.

Themes: hand-coded, professionally designed

The homepage highlights "Professionally designed, hand-coded themes" as a core selling point. That matters for two reasons:

• Hand-coded means the themes are built as real templates rather than assembled from a page builder, which fits Publii's static-output model.
• Professionally designed signals they are meant to be usable out of the box for content-focused sites — the page names blogs, portfolios, and documentation sites as the target use cases.

Publii's positioning is "a free desktop CMS for blogs, portfolios, documentation sites and other content-focused websites," so the bundled theme set is oriented toward those formats rather than e-commerce or app-like sites.

What the evidence does not tell you

The page evidence does not list individual theme names, counts, or which ones are premium. If theme selection is your deciding factor, go to the official themes directory and filter there rather than relying on the homepage.

Extensions: "the tools and services you use"

The relevant homepage heading is "Extend your site with the tools and services you use." Combined with the publishing options named on the page — GitHub Pages, Netlify, Amazon S3, or your own hosting via FTP — the extension story is about wiring your site into existing infrastructure rather than installing server-side plugins.

That is a structural difference worth understanding: because Publii builds a static site locally and publishes it, there is no PHP runtime and no public admin panel on the server. Extensions therefore tend to be things that act at build or publish time, or that inject third-party services into the generated output.

A concrete example

Say you want analytics on a Publii site. The homepage states there are "No tracking scripts unless you add them yourself." So the workflow is: you add the tracking snippet through the site's settings or a theme/extension hook, and it gets baked into the static HTML at build time. Nothing runs on your server, and nothing is tracked by default.

Is everything free?

Here is what the source actually supports:

The honest answer: the CMS is free and open-source, but "everything is free" is not something the page evidence confirms. The presence of a "premium" signal means you should expect that at least some themes or extensions are paid. The page does not name prices, payment platforms, or which items are gated, so do not assume a specific price or a specific free/paid split.

How to decide before you download

1. Confirm your site type. Blogs, portfolios, and documentation sites are the stated fit. If your project is something else, verify a suitable theme exists first.
2. Check the theme listing. Look for the specific theme you want and note whether it is marked free or premium.
3. Check the extension/plugin listing for any service you depend on — analytics, comments, forms, search.
4. Confirm your host. GitHub Pages, Netlify, Amazon S3, and FTP to your own hosting are all named as publish targets.
5. Download and test locally. The page lists Publii 0.48.1 for Windows 10+ (64-bit), macOS 12+, and Linux (64-bit), updated October 9, 2026. Since everything builds on your machine, you can evaluate themes and extensions before anything goes live.

The trade-off in one line

You give up a server-side plugin ecosystem and a hosted admin panel; in exchange you get no database, no PHP, no public admin panel to break into, and no tracking by default — with the caveat that the exact free-versus-premium boundary for themes and extensions has to be checked on the official listings, not inferred from the homepage.