When comparing Nanoc vs Octopress, the Slant community recommends Octopress for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Octopress is ranked 4th while Nanoc is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Octopress is:
Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get going.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Very easy to use
Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get going.
Pro Lots of plugins (from Jekyll + 3rd party)
Another advantage of being based on Jekyll is default access to the extensive plugin system for Jekyll. There are also plugins developed specifically for Octopress.
Pro Based on Jekyll
As Octopress is simply a framework on top of Jekyll, it benefits from being based on one of the most popular site generators available. The primary benefit is that it is backed by git and is built in such a way that the site can be easily re-generated if the content changes.
Pro Uses Markdown for writing
Uses the Markdown syntax for writing blogs.
Cons
Con Not Actively Developed
Last commit is Feb 22, 2016, Social media hasn't been updated. Dead project?
Con Inefficient
Adding a new post, for example, causes the entire blog to be regenerated.