Overview

Hugo

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes206

Gatsby

Stacks3.2K

Followers2.4K

Votes121

GitHub Stars55.9K

Forks10.3K

Gatsby vs Hugo: What are the differences?

Introduction

Gatsby and Hugo are both static site generators that allow developers to create fast, efficient, and highly customizable websites. While they share some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart. This markdown code will highlight the main differences between Gatsby and Hugo.

Development Language: Gatsby is primarily built using JavaScript and utilizes React as its front-end framework. This makes it a great choice for developers who are already familiar with JavaScript and want to leverage the power of React. On the other hand, Hugo is built using the Go programming language, which provides advantages such as better performance and concurrency. Developers comfortable with Go will find Hugo an appealing choice.
Plugin Ecosystem: Gatsby boasts a rich and extensive plugin ecosystem which allows developers to easily add functionality and features to their websites. These plugins can be used to optimize images, fetch data from various CMS platforms, add analytics, and much more. Hugo, on the other hand, has a smaller plugin ecosystem compared to Gatsby. While it still offers useful plugins, the range and diversity are not as extensive as Gatsby.
Performance and Building: Gatsby's build process includes a pre-rendering step, where the entire website is generated as static HTML and assets. This results in blazing fast performance as the website is served directly from a CDN, ensuring quick load times. Additionally, Gatsby utilizes GraphQL to fetch data, enabling developers to have fine-grained control over their data sources. Hugo, on the other hand, is known for its exceptional speed due to its single-binary architecture. It builds static websites incredibly quickly, making it an ideal choice for projects that require rapid development and deployment.
Themability: Gatsby offers a wide range of themes and starter kits that can be easily customized and tailored to suit specific design requirements. These themes provide a starting point for developers and help accelerate the development process. Hugo, on the other hand, has a more flexible theming system. Developers can create their own themes from scratch or choose from existing themes available in the Hugo themes repository. This flexibility allows for greater customization but can require more initial setup and configuration.
Community and Learning Resources: Gatsby has a vibrant and active community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and learning resources. This makes it easy for developers to get started with Gatsby and find answers to their questions. Hugo also has a supportive community with a range of learning resources available, but it may not have the same level of activity and breadth as Gatsby's community.
Hosting and Deployment Options: Gatsby websites can be deployed to various hosting platforms and services, including popular options like Netlify, Vercel, and AWS Amplify. This allows for seamless deployment and scaling of websites. Hugo, on the other hand, generates a static website that can be hosted on any web server or content delivery network (CDN) of choice. This gives developers more flexibility in terms of hosting options.

In Summary, Gatsby and Hugo differ in terms of the development language, plugin ecosystem, performance, themability, community support, and hosting options. Choosing between the two depends on specific project requirements, developer preferences, and familiarity with the respective technologies.

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Advice on Hugo, Gatsby

Axel

Apr 2, 2021

Review

Me and a lot of colleagues have done documentation collaboratively with https://hackmd.io/ which also comes as an open source fork as https://hedgedoc.org/. The first has commenting function, the latter hasn't. Both make it easy to do doc sprints synchronously which means everybody is on the phone at the same time and write down documentation. As you do this with Markdown you can use your writing with https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ e.g. which is a static site generator running on Python and build beautiful documentation from Markdown files. If you want to build with https://gohugo.io/ I recommend https://www.docsy.dev/ theme.

We do scholarly writing and documentation with GitLab which we host on-premise. GitHub and GitLab come with sophisticated workflows for commenting and quality assurance if you learn to branch and merge which is for a lot of folks a steep learning curve. To onboard colleagues I recommend starting with HedgeDoc first and then migrate to more advanced workflows with Git(Lab|Hub).

22k views22k

Comments

Joseph

Apr 2, 2021

Needs adviceon

Gatsby

Golang

Hi everyone, I'm trying to decide which front-end tool, that will likely use server-side rendering (SSR), in hopes it'll be faster. The end-user will upload a document and they see text output on their screen (like SaaS or microservice). I read that Gatsby can also do SSR. Also want to add a headless CMS that is easy to use.

Backend is in Golang. Open to ideas. Thank you.

59.2k views59.2k

Comments

Manuel

Frontend Engineer at BI X

Jul 22, 2020

Decided

As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML or Markdown (what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.

178k views178k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hugo	Gatsby
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.	Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.
Run Anywhere - Hugo is quite possibly the easiest to install software you've ever used, simply download and run. Hugo doesn't depend on administrative privileges, databases, runtimes, interpreters or external libraries. Sites built with Hugo can be deployed on S3, Github Pages, Dropbox or any web host.;Fast & Powerful - Hugo is written for speed and performance. Great care has been taken to ensure that Hugo build time is as short as possible. We're talking milliseconds to build your entire site for most setups.; Flexible - Hugo is designed to work how you do. Organize your content however you want with any URL structure. Declare your own content types. Define your own meta data in YAML, TOML or JSON.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 55.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 10.3K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 3.2K
Followers 1.2K	Followers 2.4K
Votes 206	Votes 121
Pros & Cons
Pros 47 Lightning fast 29 Single Executable 26 Easy setup 24 Great development community 23 Open source Cons 4 No Plugins/Extensions 2 Template syntax not friendly 1 Quick builds	Pros 28 Generated websites are super fast 16 Fast 15 GraphQL 10 Progressive Web Apps generation 9 Reusable components (React) Cons 7 No ssr 4 Documentation isn't complete. 3 Very slow builds 2 Slow builds 2 For-profit
Integrations
Markdown Golang	WordPress TypeScript GraphCMS Babel prismic.io AWS Amplify Glamorous Prisma styled-components Emotion

What are some alternatives to Hugo, Gatsby?

Jekyll

Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

Hexo

Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

Metalsmith

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

11ty

A simpler static site generator. An alternative to Jekyll. Written in JavaScript. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML. Works with HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, Haml, Pug, and JavaScript Template Literals.

MkDocs

It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.

VuePress

A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects.