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Middleman

Stacks144

Followers135

+ 1

Votes57

Pelican

Stacks44

Followers56

+ 1

Votes27

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Middleman vs Pelican: What are the differences?

Middleman: A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment; Pelican: A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic. 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.

Middleman and Pelican can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Middleman are:

Sass for DRY stylesheets
CoffeeScript for safer and less verbose javascript
Multiple asset management solutions, including Sprockets

On the other hand, Pelican provides the following key features:

Blog articles and pages
Comments, via an external service (Disqus). (Please note that while useful, Disqus is an external service, and thus the comment data will be somewhat outside of your control and potentially subject to data loss.)
Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates)

"Rails for static sites" is the top reason why over 17 developers like Middleman, while over 6 developers mention "Open source" as the leading cause for choosing Pelican.

Middleman and Pelican are both open source tools. Pelican with 8.89K GitHub stars and 1.58K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Middleman with 6.49K GitHub stars and 696 GitHub forks.

What is Middleman?

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

What is 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.

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Why do developers choose Middleman?

Why do developers choose Pelican?

18
Rails for static sites
16
Live reload
15
Erb, haml, slim
5
Easy setup
2
Emacs org-mode integration by middleman-org
1
Make front-end easy and rock solid again

Add a pro

7
Open source
5
Jinja2
4
Implemented in Python
4
Easy to deploy
3
Plugability
2
RestructuredText and Markdown support
1
Easy to customize

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What companies use Middleman?

What companies use Pelican?

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What tools integrate with Middleman?

What tools integrate with Pelican?

What are some alternatives to Middleman and Pelican?

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.

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.

VuePress

A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects.

See all alternatives

Decisions about Middleman and Pelican

Ronan Levesque

Software engineer at Algolia · a year ago | 18 upvotes · 167.3K views

Algolia

Middleman

Ruby

Gatsby

React

A few months ago we decided to move our whole static website (www.algolia.com) to a new stack. At the time we were using a website generator called Middleman, written in Ruby. As a team of only front-end developers we didn't feel very comfortable with the language itself, and the time it took to build was not satisfying. We decided to move to Gatsby to take advantage of its use of React , as well as its incredibly high performances in terms of build and page rendering.

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