Gatsby vs Middleman

Overview

Middleman

Stacks170

Followers192

Votes66

GitHub Stars7.1K

Forks757

Gatsby

Stacks3.3K

Followers2.4K

Votes121

GitHub Stars55.9K

Forks10.3K

Gatsby vs Middleman: 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 Middleman? A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

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

"Generated websites are super fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Gatsby over the competitors, whereas "Rails for static sites" was stated as the key factor in picking Middleman.

Gatsby and Middleman are both open source tools. It seems that Gatsby with 36.2K GitHub stars and 5.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Middleman with 6.49K GitHub stars and 696 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Gatsby has a broader approval, being mentioned in 49 company stacks & 139 developers stacks; compared to Middleman, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.

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Advice on Middleman, Gatsby

Joseph

Apr 2, 2021

Needs adviceon

Gatsby

Golang

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

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

Middleman	Gatsby
Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.	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	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 7.1K	GitHub Stars 55.9K
GitHub Forks 757	GitHub Forks 10.3K
Stacks 170	Stacks 3.3K
Followers 192	Followers 2.4K
Votes 66	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 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	WordPress TypeScript GraphCMS Babel prismic.io AWS Amplify Glamorous Prisma styled-components Emotion

What are some alternatives to Middleman, Gatsby?

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.

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

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.

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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