Which is generally the better choice for a new project today, FreeMarker or Velocity, and why?

For a brand-new project with no existing investment in either engine, FreeMarker is generally the safer default, for a few concrete reasons rather than just general reputation.

1. Maintenance activity: FreeMarker is actively released by the Apache Software Foundation, with stable releases such as 2.3.34 and 2.3.35 landing in recent years; Velocity's release cadence has been far slower by comparison.
2. Stricter language: FreeMarker's type-aware expression language and explicit missing-value operators (??, !) catch more template-author mistakes at parse or use time, where Velocity tends to fail more silently or produce unexpected blank output.
3. Output-format awareness: FreeMarker's output_format/auto-escaping mechanism is built in; Velocity has no equivalent, so escaping is left to the template author to get right manually.
4. Flexibility of output: neither engine is tied to HTML, but FreeMarker's broader ecosystem usage for code generation and non-web output means more current documentation and examples exist for those cases.

Velocity still appears legitimately in long-lived codebases already built around it - migrating a large, working template set purely for its own sake is rarely worth the cost - but for something starting from scratch, FreeMarker's combination of active maintenance and stricter defaults makes it the more defensible choice.