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Add to SafariWhen comparing Middleman vs Sitegen, the Slant community recommends Middleman for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Middleman is ranked 7th while Sitegen is ranked 32nd. 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 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
Pro Easy configuration
You configure the site with a site.moon file. It is written in MoonScript.
Pro Powerful templating
It uses the cosmo templating language. It enables you to inject stuff into the page as it is being generated.
Pro Extendable through plugins
It has a plugin system. It comes bundled with some plugins already, like syntax highlighting. You can write your own plugins.
Pro HTML and Markdown
Pages and templates can be written in HTML or Markdown
Pro Easy
It's pretty easy to get started with.
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.
