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Assemble vs Hexo: What are the differences?
What is Assemble? The static site generator for Node.js, Grunt.js and Yeoman. Most popular site generator for Grunt.js and Yeoman. Assemble is used to build hundreds of web projects, ranging in size from a single page to 14,000 pages (that we're aware of!).
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.
Assemble and Hexo belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Assemble are:
- Allows you to carve your HTML up into reusable fragments: partials, includes, sections, snippets... Whatever you prefer to call them, Assemble does that.
- Optionally use layouts to wrap your pages with commonly used elements and content.
- "Pages" can either be defined as HTML/templates, JSON or YAML, or directly inside the Gruntfile.
On the other hand, Hexo provides the following key features:
- 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.
Assemble and Hexo are both open source tools. Hexo with 27.1K GitHub stars and 3.6K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Assemble with 3.7K GitHub stars and 256 GitHub forks.
I have been building a website with Gatsby (for a small group of volunteers). I track it in GitHub and push it to Amazon S3.
I am satisfied with it as a single user; however, I would like to get non-technical teammates to be able to post Markdown blog posts. I tried to teach them to add mdx files, git push, gastby build, and publish with gatsby-plugin-s3, but I am getting a fair amount of resistance :).
So I wonder if there are tools, preferably using Node.js, that allow multi-user blog authors a la wordpress, i.e. with an interface for non technical bloggers, but producing static/pre-rendered web pages.
(PS: I am considering having a node/express.js server where they could upload their mdx file and the server would re-build push and publish for them, without having them install anything, but I'd like to know if something already exists before jumping into this endeavor)
If you're after Markdown I would look at https://www.netlifycms.org. I've used it on several projects to allow clients to use Markdown to publish and it integrates really well with Gatsby. You can create your own content structures using it then implement them into your templates. These are all the widgets you can use: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/widgets/
This keeps it strictly static file driven with no database or need for express etc.
Pros of Assemble
Pros of Hexo
- Ease of deployment18
- Uses NodeJS and npm13
- Easy GitHub Pages publishing12
- Powerful templating10
- Useful tools and plugins7
- Easy intergrating with js4
- Open source3
- Blazing Fast3