Hexo vs Metalsmith

Overview

Hexo

Stacks358

Followers386

Votes70

GitHub Stars41.0K

Forks5.0K

Metalsmith

Stacks53

Followers66

Votes19

Hexo vs Metalsmith: What are the differences?

Developers describe Hexo as "A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js". 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. On the other hand, Metalsmith is detailed as "An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator". 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.

Hexo and Metalsmith can be primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Hexo are:

Blazing Fast - Node.js brings you incredible generating speed. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build.
Markdown Support - All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported. You can even use most Octopress plugins in Hexo.
One-Command Deployment - You only need one command to deploy your site to GitHub Pages, Heroku or other sites.

On the other hand, Metalsmith provides the following key features:

Read template files from a directory
Parse files for template placeholders
Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 8 developers mention "Plugability" as the leading cause for choosing Metalsmith.

Hexo and Metalsmith are both open source tools. Hexo with 26.9K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Metalsmith with 7.26K GitHub stars and 641 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Hexo, Metalsmith

Arnaud

Mar 25, 2022

Needs adviceon

Gatsby

GitHub

Amazon S3

I have been building a website with Gatsby (for a small group of volunteers). I track it in GitHub and push it to Amazon S3.

I am satisfied with it as a single user; however, I would like to get non-technical teammates to be able to post Markdown blog posts. I tried to teach them to add mdx files, git push, gastby build, and publish with gatsby-plugin-s3, but I am getting a fair amount of resistance :).

So I wonder if there are tools, preferably using Node.js, that allow multi-user blog authors a la wordpress, i.e. with an interface for non technical bloggers, but producing static/pre-rendered web pages.

(PS: I am considering having a node/express.js server where they could upload their mdx file and the server would re-build push and publish for them, without having them install anything, but I'd like to know if something already exists before jumping into this endeavor)

66.9k views66.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hexo	Metalsmith
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.	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.
Blazing Fast - Node.js brings you incredible generating speed. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build.;Markdown Support - All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported. You can even use most Octopress plugins in Hexo.;One-Command Deployment - You only need one command to deploy your site to GitHub Pages, Heroku or other sites.;Various Plugins - Hexo has a powerful plugin system. You can install more plugins for Jade, CoffeeScript plugins.	Read template files from a directory;Parse files for template placeholders;Prompt user to fill in each placeholder;Render files with aytemplating engine;Write filled-in files to a new directory
Statistics
GitHub Stars 41.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 358	Stacks 53
Followers 386	Followers 66
Votes 70	Votes 19
Pros & Cons
Pros 18 Ease of deployment 13 Uses NodeJS and npm 12 Easy GitHub Pages publishing 10 Powerful templating 7 Useful tools and plugins	Pros 9 Plugability 4 Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy 2 Really works hard to be simple 1 Chain plugins like a file processing pipe 1 Use any templating engine
Integrations
TypeScript Netlify CoffeeScript Heroku Node.js GitHub Pages Azure Search	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Hexo, Metalsmith?

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.

Hugo

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

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Hexo are:

Blazing Fast - Node.js brings you incredible generating speed. Hundreds of files take only seconds to build.
Markdown Support - All features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are supported. You can even use most Octopress plugins in Hexo.
One-Command Deployment - You only need one command to deploy your site to GitHub Pages, Heroku or other sites.

On the other hand, Metalsmith provides the following key features:

Read template files from a directory
Parse files for template placeholders
Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 8 developers mention "Plugability" as the leading cause for choosing Metalsmith.

Hexo vs Metalsmith