Hexo vs Wintersmith

Overview

Hexo

Stacks358

Followers386

Votes70

GitHub Stars41.0K

Forks5.0K

Wintersmith

Stacks7

Followers12

Votes1

GitHub Stars3.5K

Forks327

Hexo vs Wintersmith: What are the differences?

Developers describe Hexo as "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. On the other hand, Wintersmith is detailed as "Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator built on top of node.js". Wintersmith is a simple yet flexible static site generator. It takes contents (markdown, less, scripts, etc), transforms them using plugins and outputs a static website (html, css, images, etc) that you can host anywhere.

Hexo and Wintersmith belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Hexo are:

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.

On the other hand, Wintersmith provides the following key features:

Flexible - Wintersmith tries not to put any limitations on how you work with your content. You can transform it using plugins and structure it as you please.
Templating - Use your favorite templating engine, it comes bundled with a Jade plugin and there is community made plugins for most other node.js templating engines.
Markdown - No more fiddling around with WYSIWYG editors. Once you start using Markdown to author your content you'll never look back!

Hexo and Wintersmith are both open source tools. It seems that Hexo with 27.1K GitHub stars and 3.6K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Wintersmith with 3.48K GitHub stars and 349 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Hexo, Wintersmith

Arnaud

Mar 25, 2022

Needs adviceon

Gatsby

GitHub

Amazon S3

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)

66.9k views66.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hexo	Wintersmith
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.	Wintersmith is a simple yet flexible static site generator. It takes contents (markdown, less, scripts, etc), transforms them using plugins and outputs a static website (html, css, images, etc) that you can host anywhere.
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.	Flexible - Wintersmith tries not to put any limitations on how you work with your content. You can transform it using plugins and structure it as you please.;Templating - Use your favorite templating engine, it comes bundled with a Jade plugin and there is community made plugins for most other node.js templating engines.; Markdown - No more fiddling around with WYSIWYG editors. Once you start using Markdown to author your content you'll never look back!;More than blogging- Write web applications using the latest technologies without having to host your own node.js servers, or use it to increase speeds on large-scale sites.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 41.0K	GitHub Stars 3.5K
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks 327
Stacks 358	Stacks 7
Followers 386	Followers 12
Votes 70	Votes 1
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 1 Easy setup
Integrations
TypeScript Netlify CoffeeScript Heroku Node.js GitHub Pages Azure Search	Markdown

What are some alternatives to Hexo, Wintersmith?

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.

Gatsby

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

Middleman

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Hexo are:

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.

On the other hand, Wintersmith provides the following key features:

Flexible - Wintersmith tries not to put any limitations on how you work with your content. You can transform it using plugins and structure it as you please.
Templating - Use your favorite templating engine, it comes bundled with a Jade plugin and there is community made plugins for most other node.js templating engines.
Markdown - No more fiddling around with WYSIWYG editors. Once you start using Markdown to author your content you'll never look back!

Hexo vs Wintersmith