Wintersmith vs Roots

Wintersmith has an extensive Markdown support. Default, it is rendered by Marked. However there are plugins available for others (such as Markdown-it).

Templating engine comes with Jade plugin and many third-party plugins.

Wintersmith only has a predefined directory structure, everything else can built any way you want.

Node.js is a software platform for scalable server-side and networking applications.

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.