Hugo vs Wintersmith

Overview

Wintersmith

Stacks7

Followers12

Votes1

GitHub Stars3.5K

Forks327

Hugo

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.2K

Votes206

Hugo vs Wintersmith: What are the differences?

What is Hugo? 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.

What is Wintersmith? 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.

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

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, 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!

Hugo and Wintersmith are both open source tools. Hugo with 36K GitHub stars and 4.05K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Wintersmith with 3.47K GitHub stars and 348 GitHub forks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Wintersmith, 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

Wintersmith	Hugo
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.	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.
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.	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
GitHub Stars 3.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 327	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 7	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 12	Followers 1.2K
Votes 1	Votes 206
Pros & Cons
Pros 1 Easy setup	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
Markdown	Markdown Golang

What are some alternatives to Wintersmith, 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.

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 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, 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!

Hugo vs Wintersmith