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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Gatsby vs Hexo

Gatsby vs Hexo

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Hexo
Hexo
Stacks358
Followers386
Votes70
GitHub Stars41.0K
Forks5.0K
Gatsby
Gatsby
Stacks3.3K
Followers2.4K
Votes121
GitHub Stars55.9K
Forks10.3K

Gatsby vs Hexo: What are the differences?

What is Gatsby? Free, open source framework for building blazing fast websites and apps with React. Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

What is 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.

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

"Generated websites are super fast" is the top reason why over 8 developers like Gatsby, while over 15 developers mention "Ease of deployment" as the leading cause for choosing Hexo.

Gatsby and Hexo are both open source tools. It seems that Gatsby with 36.2K GitHub stars and 5.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Hexo with 27.1K GitHub stars and 3.6K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Gatsby has a broader approval, being mentioned in 49 company stacks & 139 developers stacks; compared to Hexo, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.

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Advice on Hexo, Gatsby

Joseph
Joseph

Apr 2, 2021

Needs adviceonGatsbyGatsbyGolangGolang

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.

59.3k views59.3k
Comments
Manuel
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

Hexo
Hexo
Gatsby
Gatsby

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.

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

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
41.0K
GitHub Stars
55.9K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
10.3K
Stacks
358
Stacks
3.3K
Followers
386
Followers
2.4K
Votes
70
Votes
121
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
  • 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
    For-profit
  • 2
    Flash of unstyled content issues
Integrations
TypeScript
TypeScript
Netlify
Netlify
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript
Heroku
Heroku
Node.js
Node.js
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages
Azure Search
Azure Search
WordPress
WordPress
TypeScript
TypeScript
GraphCMS
GraphCMS
Babel
Babel
prismic.io
prismic.io
AWS Amplify
AWS Amplify
Glamorous
Glamorous
Prisma
Prisma
styled-components
styled-components
Emotion
Emotion

What are some alternatives to Hexo, Gatsby?

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.

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.

Pelican

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

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

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

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.

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