Hugo vs Metalsmith

Overview

Metalsmith

Stacks53

Followers66

Votes19

Hugo

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes206

Hugo vs Metalsmith: What are the differences?

Developers describe Hugo as "A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator built with love by spf13 in GoLang". 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. On the other hand, Metalsmith is detailed as "An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator". 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.

Hugo and Metalsmith can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Hugo are:

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.

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

Read template files from a directory
Parse files for template placeholders
Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

"Lightning fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Hugo over the competitors, whereas "Plugability" was stated as the key factor in picking Metalsmith.

Hugo and Metalsmith are both open source tools. It seems that Hugo with 36.4K GitHub stars and 4.09K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Metalsmith with 7.27K GitHub stars and 640 GitHub forks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Metalsmith, Hugo

Axel

Apr 2, 2021

Review

Me and a lot of colleagues have done documentation collaboratively with https://hackmd.io/ which also comes as an open source fork as https://hedgedoc.org/. The first has commenting function, the latter hasn't. Both make it easy to do doc sprints synchronously which means everybody is on the phone at the same time and write down documentation. As you do this with Markdown you can use your writing with https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ e.g. which is a static site generator running on Python and build beautiful documentation from Markdown files. If you want to build with https://gohugo.io/ I recommend https://www.docsy.dev/ theme.

We do scholarly writing and documentation with GitLab which we host on-premise. GitHub and GitLab come with sophisticated workflows for commenting and quality assurance if you learn to branch and merge which is for a lot of folks a steep learning curve. To onboard colleagues I recommend starting with HedgeDoc first and then migrate to more advanced workflows with Git(Lab|Hub).

22k views22k

Comments

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

Metalsmith	Hugo
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.	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.
Read template files from a directory;Parse files for template placeholders;Prompt user to fill in each placeholder;Render files with aytemplating engine;Write filled-in files to a new directory	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
Stacks 53	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 66	Followers 1.2K
Votes 19	Votes 206
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 Plugability 4 Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy 2 Really works hard to be simple 1 Use any templating engine 1 Chain plugins like a file processing pipe	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
Integrations
No integrations available	Markdown Golang

What are some alternatives to Metalsmith, Hugo?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Hugo are:

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.

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

Read template files from a directory
Parse files for template placeholders
Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

"Lightning fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Hugo over the competitors, whereas "Plugability" was stated as the key factor in picking Metalsmith.

Hugo vs Metalsmith