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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.
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 Jekyll
- Github pages integration74
- Open source54
- It's slick, customisable and hackerish37
- Easy to deploy24
- Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset23
- Gitlab pages integration7
- Best for blogging5
- Low maintenance2
- Easy to integrate localization2
- Huge plugins ecosystem1
- Authoring freedom and simplicity1
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 Jekyll
- Build time increases exponentially as site grows4
- Lack of developments lately2
- Og doesn't work with postings dynamically1