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Jekyll

2K
1.4K
+ 1
230
Metalsmith

49
66
+ 1
19
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Jekyll vs Metalsmith: What are the differences?

What is Jekyll? Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby. 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.

What is Metalsmith? 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.

Jekyll and Metalsmith can be primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Jekyll are:

  • Simple - No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content.
  • Static - Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
  • Blog-aware - Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.

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

"Github pages integration" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Jekyll, while over 8 developers mention "Plugability" as the leading cause for choosing Metalsmith.

Jekyll and Metalsmith are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38.1K GitHub stars and 8.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Metalsmith with 7.27K GitHub stars and 640 GitHub forks.

Decisions about Jekyll and Metalsmith
Manuel Feller
Frontend Engineer at BI X · | 4 upvotes · 161.4K views

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.

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Pros of Jekyll
Pros of Metalsmith
  • 74
    Github pages integration
  • 54
    Open source
  • 37
    It's slick, customisable and hackerish
  • 24
    Easy to deploy
  • 23
    Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
  • 7
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 5
    Best for blogging
  • 2
    Low maintenance
  • 2
    Easy to integrate localization
  • 1
    Huge plugins ecosystem
  • 1
    Authoring freedom and simplicity
  • 9
    Plugability
  • 4
    Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy
  • 2
    Really works hard to be simple
  • 1
    Chain plugins like a file processing pipe
  • 1
    CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)
  • 1
    Build any kind of website
  • 1
    Use any templating engine

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Cons of Jekyll
Cons of Metalsmith
  • 4
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows
  • 2
    Lack of developments lately
  • 1
    Og doesn't work with postings dynamically
    Be the first to leave a con

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is 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.

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Jekyll?
    What companies use Metalsmith?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Jekyll or Metalsmith.
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    What tools integrate with Jekyll?
    What tools integrate with Metalsmith?

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    What are some alternatives to Jekyll and Metalsmith?
    WordPress
    The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
    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.
    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.
    Ghost
    Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.
    Sphinx
    It lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with it pretty much as with a database server.
    See all alternatives