When comparing Roots vs Grav, the Slant community recommends Grav for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Grav is ranked 17th while Roots is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Grav is:
Since Grav is built with PHP, it can be hosted on almost all web hosting providers. If the provider supports Wordpress, they also support Grav.
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 Can be hosted with any provider
Since Grav is built with PHP, it can be hosted on almost all web hosting providers. If the provider supports Wordpress, they also support Grav.
Pro Easy creation of templates and content
Supports Twig for templating with Parsedown for fast Markdown and Markdown Extra support.
Pro Easy to use admin panel
Well designed, easily usable and modern admin panel is a boost as it lets Clients edit the content easily.
Pro Custom fields for content
YAML-based page headers allow you easily add custom dynamic fields to your content.
Pro Open-source and free
Pro Extensive Documentation
Documentation is not an afterthought! Grav has a dedicated documentation site plus loads of tutorials and guides.
Pro Extensive documentation
Documentation is not an afterthought. Grav has a dedicated documentation site plus loads of tutorials and guides.
Pro Built-in package manager
Pro CLI Tools
Command line tools such as dependency installation, cache clearing, user creation, and backups.
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.