Hexo vs Middleman

Overview

Middleman

Stacks170

Followers192

Votes66

GitHub Stars7.1K

Forks757

Hexo

Stacks358

Followers386

Votes70

GitHub Stars41.0K

Forks5.0K

Hexo vs Middleman: What are the differences?

Hexo: 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; Middleman: A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Hexo and Middleman belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.

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, Middleman provides the following key features:

Sass for DRY stylesheets
CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript
Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets

"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 17 developers mention "Rails for static sites" as the leading cause for choosing Middleman.

Hexo and Middleman are both open source tools. It seems that Hexo with 26.9K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Middleman with 6.48K GitHub stars and 699 GitHub forks.

DigitalOcean, Poll Everywhere, and Virtkick are some of the popular companies that use Middleman, whereas Hexo is used by Hazeorid, Erudika, and Flex.io. Middleman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 32 company stacks & 16 developers stacks; compared to Hexo, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 23 developer stacks.

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Advice on Middleman, Hexo

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

Middleman	Hexo
Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.	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.
Sass for DRY stylesheets;CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript;Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets;ERb & Haml for dynamic pages and simplified HTML syntax	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 7.1K	GitHub Stars 41.0K
GitHub Forks 757	GitHub Forks 5.0K
Stacks 170	Stacks 358
Followers 192	Followers 386
Votes 66	Votes 70
Pros & Cons
Pros 20 Rails for static sites 18 Erb, haml, slim 17 Live reload 7 Easy setup 3 Emacs org-mode integration by middleman-org	Pros 18 Ease of deployment 13 Uses NodeJS and npm 12 Easy GitHub Pages publishing 10 Powerful templating 7 Useful tools and plugins
Integrations
No integrations available	TypeScript Netlify CoffeeScript Heroku Node.js GitHub Pages Azure Search

What are some alternatives to Middleman, Hexo?

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.

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.

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, Middleman provides the following key features:

Sass for DRY stylesheets
CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript
Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets

"Ease of deployment" is the top reason why over 15 developers like Hexo, while over 17 developers mention "Rails for static sites" as the leading cause for choosing Middleman.

Hexo vs Middleman