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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. DocPad vs Metalsmith vs Pelican

DocPad vs Metalsmith vs Pelican

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pelican
Pelican
Stacks89
Followers113
Votes28
GitHub Stars13.1K
Forks1.8K
Metalsmith
Metalsmith
Stacks53
Followers66
Votes19
DocPad
DocPad
Stacks55
Followers19
Votes24

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Detailed Comparison

Pelican
Pelican
Metalsmith
Metalsmith
DocPad
DocPad

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.

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.

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.

Blog articles and pages;Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.);Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates);PDF generation of the articles/pages (optional);Publication of articles in multiple languages;Atom/RSS feeds;Code syntax highlighting;Import from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds;Integration with external tools: Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. (optional);Fast rebuild times thanks to content caching and selective output writing.
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
Versioning;Pre-Built Skeletons;Language Agnostic;Simple Deploys;Powerful Plugins
Statistics
GitHub Stars
13.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
1.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
89
Stacks
53
Stacks
55
Followers
113
Followers
66
Followers
19
Votes
28
Votes
19
Votes
24
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Jinja2
  • 4
    Easy to deploy
  • 4
    Implemented in Python
  • 3
    Plugability
Pros
  • 9
    Plugability
  • 4
    Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy
  • 2
    Really works hard to be simple
  • 1
    CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)
  • 1
    Build any kind of website
Pros
  • 4
    Npm
  • 3
    Plugins. Easy to use
  • 3
    Database-free
  • 3
    Open Source
  • 2
    Free
Integrations
Markdown
Markdown
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to Pelican, Metalsmith, DocPad?

Jekyll

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

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

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

Hexo

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

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

Gridsome

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.

11ty

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

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

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.

Nikola

Nikola

It is a Python package that allows the user to create static websites using Python metadata. Static websites are safer, use fewer resources, and avoid vendor and platform lock-in.

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