Bear Blog wins on every metric I care about. Pika.page is the prettier interface for people who would rather not see Markdown.
Bear Blog ships pages at roughly 2.7kb with no trackers, no JavaScript, no stylesheet bloat. Premium is $5/month or $199 lifetime and covers up to 10 sites under one account. It has been running since 2020 on Django/Heroku, the founder Herman Martinus publishes infrastructure costs openly, and he answers support emails himself, often the same day. Markdown-first, full CSS control, LaTeX support, custom variables.
Pika.page launched in 2024 by Good Enough. TipTap visual editor, five themes, autosave, YouTube/Vimeo embeds. $6/month for unlimited posts and a custom domain. No published performance numbers, no community to speak of, and the SEO controls are limited.
If you want to write Markdown and own the output, Bear Blog. If you want a WYSIWYG editor and do not mind paying more for a younger product with proprietary internals, Pika. For anyone running multiple sites the £5-for-10 maths makes Bear the only sensible answer.