Cactus vs Hexo

Overview

Hexo

Stacks358

Followers386

Votes70

GitHub Stars41.0K

Forks5.0K

Cactus

Stacks6

Followers21

Votes4

Cactus vs Hexo: What are the differences?

Developers describe Cactus as "Static site generator for designers. Uses Python and Django templates". Cactus makes setting up a website look easy. Choose a template for a blog, portfolio or single page and Cactus generates all files and folders to get you on your way. On the other hand, Hexo is detailed 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.

Cactus and Hexo can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Cactus are:

Mac App
Focus on editing - Under the hood, Cactus runs a small local web server for each website you're working on. This makes it possible to build your website locally, using modern web technologies, and have the results generated to a collection of flat files.
Live preview anywhere - Cactus monitors all changes you make to your files and automatically refreshes your browser. Preview your project on mobile devices, and they'll instantly refresh too.

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

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.

Cactus and Hexo are both open source tools. It seems that Hexo with 27.1K GitHub stars and 3.6K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Cactus with 3.29K GitHub stars and 316 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Hexo, Cactus

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	Cactus
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.	Cactus makes setting up a website look easy. Choose a template for a blog, portfolio or single page and Cactus generates all files and folders to get you on your way.
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.	Mac App; Focus on editing - Under the hood, Cactus runs a small local web server for each website you're working on. This makes it possible to build your website locally, using modern web technologies, and have the results generated to a collection of flat files.;Live preview anywhere - Cactus monitors all changes you make to your files and automatically refreshes your browser. Preview your project on mobile devices, and they'll instantly refresh too.;Deploy with confidence - Cactus uses Amazon S3 for fast, reliable and inexpensive hosting, so you can get your projects on the web faster.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 41.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 358	Stacks 6
Followers 386	Followers 21
Votes 70	Votes 4
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 2 Mac app 1 Django templates 1 One-click S3 integration
Integrations
TypeScript Netlify CoffeeScript Heroku Node.js GitHub Pages Azure Search	Amazon S3

What are some alternatives to Hexo, Cactus?

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Cactus are:

Mac App
Focus on editing - Under the hood, Cactus runs a small local web server for each website you're working on. This makes it possible to build your website locally, using modern web technologies, and have the results generated to a collection of flat files.
Live preview anywhere - Cactus monitors all changes you make to your files and automatically refreshes your browser. Preview your project on mobile devices, and they'll instantly refresh too.

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

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.

Cactus vs Hexo