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  1. Stackups
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  4. Static Site Generators
  5. CMS.js vs Gatsby vs React-Static

CMS.js vs Gatsby vs React-Static

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CMS.js
CMS.js
Stacks5
Followers38
Votes0
Gatsby
Gatsby
Stacks3.3K
Followers2.4K
Votes121
GitHub Stars55.9K
Forks10.3K
React-Static
React-Static
Stacks46
Followers114
Votes3

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Advice on CMS.js, Gatsby, React-Static

Manuel
Manuel

Frontend Engineer at BI X

Jul 22, 2020

Decided

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.

178k views178k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

CMS.js
CMS.js
Gatsby
Gatsby
React-Static
React-Static

CMS.js is fully client-side, Javascript site generator in the spirit of Jekyll that uses plain ol' HTML, CSS and Javascript to generate your website. CMS.js is like a file-based CMS. It takes your content, renders Markdown and delivers a complete website in Single-Page App fashion...without the aid of server-side scripting (no Node.js, PHP, Ruby, etc.).

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

React-Static is a next-gen static site generator for React. Finally, you can build a website like you do any other React App. There's no special CMS, query language, or crazy lifecycle hooks. Just good old React producing an amazing SEO-ready, user experience driven, progressively enhanced website. The effort is minimal, but the benefits are not!

Can serve full GitHub repos as a site; Can serve files from an Apache server as a site
-
React. Enough said;Blazing fast performance;Data Agnostic. Feed your site data from anywhere, however you want;Built for SEO, by SEO professionals;React-first developer experience;Painless project setup & migration;Supports 99.9% of the React ecosystem. Including CSS-in-JS libraries, custom Query layers like GraphQL, and even Redux!;Aggressive and flexible reloading
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
55.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.3K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
5
Stacks
3.3K
Stacks
46
Followers
38
Followers
2.4K
Followers
114
Votes
0
Votes
121
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 28
    Generated websites are super fast
  • 16
    Fast
  • 15
    GraphQL
  • 10
    Progressive Web Apps generation
  • 9
    Reusable components (React)
Cons
  • 7
    No ssr
  • 4
    Documentation isn't complete.
  • 3
    Very slow builds
  • 2
    For-profit
  • 2
    Slow builds
Pros
  • 2
    GraphQL
  • 1
    All the benefits of a static website + React+GraphQL
Cons
  • 1
    GraphQL
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
WordPress
WordPress
TypeScript
TypeScript
GraphCMS
GraphCMS
Babel
Babel
prismic.io
prismic.io
AWS Amplify
AWS Amplify
Glamorous
Glamorous
Prisma
Prisma
styled-components
styled-components
Emotion
Emotion
React
React

What are some alternatives to CMS.js, Gatsby, React-Static?

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.

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.

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.

Metalsmith

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.

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.

MkDocs

MkDocs

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.

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