When comparing Roots vs Hexo, the Slant community recommends Hexo for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Hexo is ranked 11th while Roots is ranked 18th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Fast and easy to use
Pro Deployment is easy and fast
Hexo built sites can be easily deployed to Github pages, Heroku, Openshift (custom cartridge needs to be setup) or any other custom solution (just copy over thepublic
folder). Any deployment is as simple as editing the _config.yml
file and running the hexo deploy
command
Pro Generating a blog is pretty fast
Generating a new blog with Hexo is generally really fast. Hexo truly lives up to it's name as a simple and fast static website generator.
Pro Constantly updated and actively maintained
Hexo's repository in GitHub is very active and it's actively being maintained. Updates are released every two or three months.
Pro Complete and helpful documentation
Hexo's documentation is very thorough and helpful, especially for people who are just starting with it.
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.
Con Relatively large community but the majority is non-english speakers
Hexo has a relatively large following and community, especially in China. While this is certainly a positive, many developers who do not know chinese would be unable to follow all the guides and tutorials out there written by their chineses counterparts.