Jekyll vs Roots

You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages.

You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve

Jekyll has Pygments code highlighting built in so you can create syntax highlighted code blocks on your blog.

Jekyll pages are structured by posts, which makes it easier to build a blog.

Link to docs

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

Watch mode will reconstruct the site as pages are updated which is great for testing.

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.

Can make sites very different from blogs but with a lot of pages by making templates using data and collections.

Roots has heavy corporate sponsorship and is worked on very actively as a full time job. That means you can rely on it.

You can deploy to heroku, github pages, s3, etc. with a single command.

Roots supports dynamic content like jekyll for every compiler and language.

Roots is currently in the process examining how to leverage newer technologies to make Roots even better. You can see the new project on github: https://github.com/carrot/roots-mini

Here is the blog post explaining the next phase of Roots: https://medium.com/@jescalan/eaa10c75eb22#.uacjziaej

Here is the stack they're experimenting with:

- jade - for markup
- babel - for JS and JS transforms
- postcss - for CSS transforms
- webpack - as the core compiler

As this is a work in process, it just means the future of Roots continues to look great.

Not only does roots support a huge number of languages and compilers out of the box, it also allows you to insert custom compilers if you want. Fun fact, roots is the only static site generator that supports dogescript

Roots compiles files once for each extension, which allows for some advanced options if you get to that stage

Roots will precompile your templates into js, which makes it really smooth to work with client-side MV* frameworks.

Since roots is written in node, everything is compiled in parallel rather than in series, making it very quick.