When comparing DocPad vs Gatsby JS, the Slant community recommends DocPad for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” DocPad is ranked 6th while Gatsby JS is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose DocPad is:
DocPad is published as an NPM module which makes it easy to integrate with an existing Node.js deployment.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Built on Node
DocPad is published as an NPM module which makes it easy to integrate with an existing Node.js deployment.
Pro Has an active plug-in ecosystem
DocPad's has a large amount of plug-ins available to extend its functionality and compatibility with other language preprocessors and markup languages.
- Javascript preprocessors include: Coffescript, TypeScript, and LiveScript.
- CSS preprocessors include: LESS, SASS, Stylus, and Roole
- HTML markups include: Markdown, and Textile
- Templating engines include: Eco, Handlebars, Moustache, HAML, CoffeeKup, Jade, and Teacup
- JSON converters include: YAML and CSON
Pro Has Live Reload
DocPad has a Live Reload plug-in that leverages websockets to automatically update the blog content for users live on the site.
Pro Built on top of the Express framework
Although DocPad is a static site generator, if you find the need to, you can extend the site with the Express framework for dynamic content as well.
Pro Has graphical admin interfaces for managing your blog
There are multiple custom interfaces, including miniCMS available to DocPad which provide WYSIWYG editing and article management.
Pro Easy to deploy
Deployment plug-ins make deploying to hosting providers even easier, with plug-ins for GitHub Pages, AWS, and Google Storage.
Pro MIT-licensed
Pro Prebuilt Skeletons
Skeletons are boilerplate setups to provide a baseline structure for you to fill content into.
Pro Document and file querying with Query Engine
DocPad leverages Query Engine to provide a query API for querying files.
Pro No page reload when navigating
Pro Based on React.js
Editing markup is phenomenally easy when you have components.
Pro Live reload
Every change you make can be almost immediately seen in a browser.
Pro A lot of plugins
Gatsby offers a lot of plugins to integrate tools like SASS, typescript, styled components, etc.
Pro Very active development
Gatsby is very actively developed and the maintainers are very helpful.
Pro Built-in code and data splitting
Pro Open Source
Pro Take content from any source
Gatsby can generate the pages with content from any sources like Drupal, Wordpress, Contentful, etc. If the source plugin is not coded for your solution, you can create it.
Pro A static site and a React app in one
The static pages are generated by Server Site Rendering of the React app. So you have all benefits of a static site, and all benefits of a React app, which is very powerful.
Pro GraphQL Data Layer
Pro A lot of examples
Gatsby have a lot of examples sites in his github repository.
Pro Beautiful out-of-the-box blog starters
Cons
Con Support for Handlebars templates is not mature - integration is awkward
Handlebars' philosophy of "no logic in templates" makes some things difficult:
- DocPad built-in template helpers aren't available by default - they have to be manually added/exposed
- DocPad's example template code often includes logic, which makes it impossible to use within Handlebars templates -- it has to be abstracted into custom helper functions.
- Can't pass objects to function calls from within HB templates.
Con More up-front investment to learn/use well
DocPad provides a LOT of extensibility and dynamic capability, which means there's more up-front investment to learn DocPad well -- and deviating from the defaults while maintaining project robustness may be difficult.
Con Written in CoffeeScript (which could be a Pro depending on your preference)
Con Code samples in Documentation and any online Q&As are in CoffeeScript only (no JavaScript samples available)
Con The default template engine (Eco) only supports CoffeeScript, not JavaScript
Con The default template engine (Eco) does not support multi-line code tags
Con A bit raw
You'll maybe have to tweak some JSX if you want something that's not covered by available themes.