Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Jekyll vs Wintersmith, the Slant community recommends Wintersmith for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Wintersmith is ranked 3rd while Jekyll is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Wintersmith is:
Wintersmith has an extensive Markdown support. Default, it is rendered by [Marked](https://github.com/chjj/marked). However there are plugins available for [others](https://github.com/jnordberg/wintersmith/wiki/Plugins) (such as [Markdown-it](https://github.com/dwaite/wintersmith-markdown-it)).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages.
Pro Can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts
Pro Has a built in server
You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve
Pro Code highlighting with pygments
Jekyll has Pygments code highlighting built in so you can create syntax highlighted code blocks on your blog.
Pro Excels at blogging
Jekyll pages are structured by posts, which makes it easier to build a blog.
Pro Decent documentation
Link to docs
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Jekyll supports importing from many dynamic blog engines:
- CSV
- Drupal 6
- Drupal 7
- Enki
- Google Reader
- Joomla
- Jrnl
- Marley
- Mephisto
- Movable Type
- Posterous
- RSS
- S9Y
- Textpattern
- Tumblr
- Typo
- WordPress
- WordPress.com
Pro Has built in watch mode
Watch mode will reconstruct the site as pages are updated which is great for testing.
Pro Large, active and helpful community
Thanks to it's popularity, Jekyll has a large and active community of users. This means there is plenty of learning material available for Jekyll and it's easy to find help from other users when needed.
Pro Customisable with data and collections
Can make sites very different from blogs but with a lot of pages by making templates using data and collections.
Pro Markdown support
Wintersmith has an extensive Markdown support. Default, it is rendered by Marked. However there are plugins available for others (such as Markdown-it).
Pro Templates
Templating engine comes with Jade plugin and many third-party plugins.
Pro Very flexible
Wintersmith only has a predefined directory structure, everything else can built any way you want.
Pro Built on node.js
Node.js is a software platform for scalable server-side and networking applications.
Cons
Con It's slow for sites with a lot of posts
Con Little Windows support
Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX.
Con Thin and disorganized documentation
The documentation for Wintersmith is lacking examples and clear explanations. It's also quite disorganized, making it difficult to find what you're looking for.
