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

Gatsby vs Hugo vs VuePress

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Hugo
Hugo
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes206
Gatsby
Gatsby
Stacks3.3K
Followers2.4K
Votes121
GitHub Stars55.9K
Forks10.3K
VuePress
VuePress
Stacks388
Followers418
Votes8
GitHub Stars22.8K
Forks4.7K

Gatsby vs Hugo vs VuePress: What are the differences?

Introduction

Gatsby, Hugo, and VuePress are all popular static site generators that help create fast and efficient websites. While they serve the same purpose, there are key differences that set them apart from each other. Let's explore these differences:

  1. Performance: Gatsby is known for its excellent performance, utilizing React and GraphQL to provide fast page loads and optimized build times. Hugo, on the other hand, is built with the Go programming language, making it incredibly fast and efficient. VuePress leverages Vue.js, which also offers excellent performance by utilizing its advanced rendering capabilities.

  2. Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Gatsby focuses on ease of use for developers familiar with JavaScript, React, and GraphQL. Its extensive documentation and large community make it relatively easy to learn. Hugo, on the other hand, caters to those with basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, using a simple templating language. VuePress, following the Vue.js ecosystem, is also beginner-friendly with its simplified file-based configuration and markdown syntax.

  3. Flexibility and Extensibility: Gatsby is extremely flexible, allowing developers to create complex websites with React components and an extensive plugin ecosystem. Hugo, being highly customizable, provides a range of themes and is suited for large-scale projects. VuePress offers great flexibility for developers familiar with Vue.js, but compared to Gatsby and Hugo, it has a smaller plugin ecosystem.

  4. SEO-friendly: Gatsby provides built-in optimizations for search engine optimization (SEO) out of the box, generating static HTML pages that are easily crawlable by search engines. Hugo also generates static HTML but requires additional configuration for SEO. VuePress, meanwhile, supports SEO features with built-in meta tag management but lacks some of the advanced optimizations offered by Gatsby.

  5. Development Environment and Live Reloading: Gatsby comes with a hot-reloading development environment, allowing developers to instantly see changes as they code. It also supports fast refresh, which preserves component state during live updates. Hugo offers live reloading, ensuring changes are immediately visible during development. VuePress, similar to Gatsby, provides a development server that automatically reloads pages on save.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Gatsby has a strong community and a vast ecosystem of plugins and starters, making it easier to find support, themes, and reusable components. Hugo also boasts a large community and offers a wide range of themes and plugins. VuePress, while having a smaller community compared to Gatsby and Hugo, is backed by the popular Vue.js framework, ensuring reliability and stability.

In summary, Gatsby shines in terms of performance, extensive plugin ecosystem, and its use of React and GraphQL. Hugo, built with Go, excels in speed, simplicity, and customization options. VuePress, leveraging Vue.js, offers an easy learning curve, flexibility, and great performance, suitable for small to medium-sized projects.

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Advice on Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress

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!

53.6k views53.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hugo
Hugo
Gatsby
Gatsby
VuePress
VuePress

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.

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.

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.
-
Built-in markdown extensions optimized for technical documentation; Ability to leverage Vue inside markdown files; Vue-powered custom theme system; Automatic Service Worker generation; Google Analytics Integration; Multi-language support; A default theme with responsive layout, optional homepage, simple out-of-the-box header-based search, customizable navbar and sidebar, and auto-generated GitHub link and page edit links
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
55.9K
GitHub Stars
22.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.3K
GitHub Forks
4.7K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
3.3K
Stacks
388
Followers
1.2K
Followers
2.4K
Followers
418
Votes
206
Votes
121
Votes
8
Pros & Cons
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
    Reusable components (React)
Cons
  • 7
    No ssr
  • 4
    Documentation isn't complete.
  • 3
    Very slow builds
  • 2
    Slow builds
  • 2
    For-profit
Pros
  • 4
    It's Vue
  • 2
    Built in text search feature
  • 2
    Created by the vue.js developers
Cons
  • 3
    Its Vue
Integrations
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
Vue.js
Vue.js
Google Analytics
Google Analytics

What are some alternatives to Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress?

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.

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.

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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