When comparing Roots vs Nikola, the Slant community recommends Nikola for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Nikola is ranked 10th while Roots is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Nikola is:
Nikola posts may be written in a variety of formats. You can write posts in HTML, with all the expressive power of HTML and CSS, and still have the benefits of a site-wide theme and navigation structure.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Active development
Roots has heavy corporate sponsorship and is worked on very actively as a full time job. That means you can rely on it.
Pro Quick deploys
You can deploy to heroku, github pages, s3, etc. with a single command.
Pro Dynamic content
Roots supports dynamic content like jekyll for every compiler and language.
Pro Currently going through an upgrade
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.
Pro Custom compilers
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
Pro Multipass compiles
Roots compiles files once for each extension, which allows for some advanced options if you get to that stage
Pro Client-side templates
Roots will precompile your templates into js, which makes it really smooth to work with client-side MV* frameworks.
Pro Quick
Since roots is written in node, everything is compiled in parallel rather than in series, making it very quick.
Pro HTML input
Nikola posts may be written in a variety of formats. You can write posts in HTML, with all the expressive power of HTML and CSS, and still have the benefits of a site-wide theme and navigation structure.
Pro Host on any web server
Nikloa sites are static files, and thus may be hosted on any web server that allows you to upload your own files. This lets you use simple and inexpensive hosting providers and still have a reliable site.
Pro Write in reStructuredText and Markdown
You have better choices for markup than raw HTML.
Pro Free open-source software (MIT license)
Cons
Con No i18n (Internationalization)
There is no i18n support out of the box. And there is only one extension that does i18n compilation with a limited feature set.
