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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.
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 Go. Open to ideas. Thank you.
If your purpose is plain simply to upload a file which can handle by backend service than Gatsby is good enough assuming you have other content pages which will benefit from faster page loads for those Headless CMS driven pages. But if you have more logical/functional aspects like deciding content/personalization at server side of web application than choose NextJS.
I have experience with Hugo and Next.js, but not with Gatsby. I would go with Next.js. However, I used Astro for my last project, so I would recommend Astro. Astro is much faster and you can use almost any frontend framework if you need to.
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.
Pros of Hugo
- Lightning fast47
- Single Executable29
- Easy setup26
- Great development community24
- Open source23
- Write in golang13
- Not HTML only - JSON, RSS8
- Hacker mindset8
- LiveReload built in7
- Gitlab pages integration4
- Easy to customize themes4
- Very fast builds4
- Well documented3
- Fast builds3
- Easy to learn3
Pros of Metalsmith
- Plugability9
- Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy4
- Really works hard to be simple2
- Chain plugins like a file processing pipe1
- CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)1
- Build any kind of website1
- Use any templating engine1
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Cons of Hugo
- No Plugins/Extensions4
- Template syntax not friendly2
- Quick builds1
Cons of Metalsmith
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