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  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Gatsby vs Hugo vs Middleman

Gatsby vs Hugo vs Middleman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Middleman
Middleman
Stacks170
Followers192
Votes66
GitHub Stars7.1K
Forks757
Hugo
Hugo
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes206
Gatsby
Gatsby
Stacks3.3K
Followers2.4K
Votes121
GitHub Stars55.9K
Forks10.3K

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Advice on Middleman, Hugo, Gatsby

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
Kazim
Kazim

Founder & Developer at Devkind

May 13, 2020

Needs advice

Fastest and quickest way to do static HTML site which is extremely fast? Do you consider above tools or is there anything more quicker or better? This is just a one time one pager site for now, no backend required. I might have such projects in future, having something to get familiar with which can immediately come into action to develop would be great advise!

53.5k views53.5k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Middleman
Middleman
Hugo
Hugo
Gatsby
Gatsby

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

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

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
Run Anywhere - Hugo is quite possibly the easiest to install software you've ever used, simply download and run. Hugo doesn't depend on administrative privileges, databases, runtimes, interpreters or external libraries. Sites built with Hugo can be deployed on S3, Github Pages, Dropbox or any web host.;Fast & Powerful - Hugo is written for speed and performance. Great care has been taken to ensure that Hugo build time is as short as possible. We're talking milliseconds to build your entire site for most setups.; Flexible - Hugo is designed to work how you do. Organize your content however you want with any URL structure. Declare your own content types. Define your own meta data in YAML, TOML or JSON.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
55.9K
GitHub Forks
757
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.3K
Stacks
170
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
3.3K
Followers
192
Followers
1.2K
Followers
2.4K
Votes
66
Votes
206
Votes
121
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
  • 47
    Lightning fast
  • 29
    Single Executable
  • 26
    Easy setup
  • 24
    Great development community
  • 23
    Open source
Cons
  • 4
    No Plugins/Extensions
  • 2
    Template syntax not friendly
  • 1
    Quick builds
Pros
  • 28
    Generated websites are super fast
  • 16
    Fast
  • 15
    GraphQL
  • 10
    Progressive Web Apps generation
  • 9
    Easy to connect with lots of CMS via official plugins
Cons
  • 7
    No ssr
  • 4
    Documentation isn't complete.
  • 3
    Very slow builds
  • 2
    For-profit
  • 2
    Flash of unstyled content issues
Integrations
No integrations available
Markdown
Markdown
Golang
Golang
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 Middleman, Hugo, 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.

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.

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.

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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