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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Metalsmith vs MkDocs

Metalsmith vs MkDocs

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Metalsmith
Metalsmith
Stacks53
Followers66
Votes19
MkDocs
MkDocs
Stacks167
Followers152
Votes14

Metalsmith vs MkDocs: What are the differences?

Developers describe Metalsmith 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. On the other hand, MkDocs is detailed as "*A static site generator *". 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.

Metalsmith and MkDocs belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.

Metalsmith is an open source tool with 7.29K GitHub stars and 645 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Metalsmith's open source repository on GitHub.

dreamineering, WorldGaming, and DroneDeploy are some of the popular companies that use Metalsmith, whereas MkDocs is used by Hactar, elmah.io, and Worldsensing - Mobility. Metalsmith has a broader approval, being mentioned in 8 company stacks & 24 developers stacks; compared to MkDocs, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Metalsmith
Metalsmith
MkDocs
MkDocs

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.

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.

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
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Statistics
Stacks
53
Stacks
167
Followers
66
Followers
152
Votes
19
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 9
    Plugability
  • 4
    Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy
  • 2
    Really works hard to be simple
  • 1
    CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)
  • 1
    Build any kind of website
Pros
  • 5
    Speed
  • 4
    Gitlab integration
  • 3
    Extensibility
  • 2
    Themes
Cons
  • 1
    Build time increases exponentially as site grows

What are some alternatives to Metalsmith, MkDocs?

Jekyll

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.

Hugo

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.

Gatsby

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

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

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

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.

Sphinx

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.

Pelican

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

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

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.

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