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Add to SafariWhen comparing Nanoc vs Middleman, the Slant community recommends Middleman for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Middleman is ranked 7th while Nanoc is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Middleman is:
[Minification and compression](http://middlemanapp.com/advanced/file-size-optimization/index.html) are as easy as setting a few configuration options, and [unique asset hashes](http://middlemanapp.com/advanced/improving-cacheability/) are available to allow you to invalidate the cache of files that change regularly.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Flexibly built
Nanoc is a good choice if you need to support a site with a more complex structure than a simple blog. Nanoc is more agnostic to the types of pages you have, and allows you to do finer tuned refinements like customizing the URL structure.
Pro Extensibile
Nanoc has a modular architecture which makes it easier to incorporate plugins and functionality from other projects as well as extend functionality.
Pro Helps you create multilingual sites
Nanoc takes multilingual sites into consideration and has features to make translations easier to implement.
Pro Unit testing integration
Nanoc has a check command to run tests against your site and make sure it meets requirements you define.
There are built in checks to validate HTML and CSS, as well as validating internal and external links.
Pro Works well with compile to languages
Nanoc is friendly with different CSS and HTML preprocessors, so you can easily use SASS, LESS, HAML, Markdown and more.
Pro Built in minification, compression, and cache busting
Minification and compression are as easy as setting a few configuration options, and unique asset hashes are available to allow you to invalidate the cache of files that change regularly.
Pro Support for a variety of templating languages and preprocessors
Middleman supports lots of compiled languages, such as Less, Markdown, Textile, CoffeeScript, Stylus and more.
Pro Extensible and flexible
Middleman has a resources page full of official and community extensions.
Pro External pipeline management with Webpack
Replace your Gulp, Grunt, Bower configs
Pro Embraces Rails conventions
Middleman follows established conventions so if you know rails, you can easily pick up middleman.
Pro Easy deployment options
Cons
Con Too much magic happens
For new users it is hard to understand what is going on and why.
Con A little more complicated than other static site generators
Middleman is a big piece of software, it's not simply a static blog generator. Because of all the functionality and flexibility it offers it can be a little more complex than other static site generators and a little harder to learn all of its bells and whistles.
