When comparing Metalsmith vs Wordpress.com, the Slant community recommends Wordpress.com for most people. In the question“What are the best blogging platforms?” Wordpress.com is ranked 5th while Metalsmith is ranked 9th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Flexible beyond a static site generator
Because metalsmith is at its core focused on transforming directories of files, it can be used for more than just static site generation, and could be used as a build tool, a documentation generator, or any use that requires file transformations.
Pro Designed around plugins
Everything in metalsmith is a plugin, and it is designed to make it easy to write new ones.
Pro Chaining API
Metalsmith uses a chaining API that's consistent and simple to use:
Metalsmith(__dirname)
.use(markdown)
.use(templates('handlebars'))
.build();
Pro Huge collection of free and paid themes out of the box
Pro Pretty easy to create and maintain a blog
Pro Import from other blogging platforms
Such as blogger.
Pro Bulk media options
Pro Widget management
Pro Support sort post by name
Pro Powerful analytics out of the box
Pro Plugins for every occassion
There are a wealth of plugins that can cater for just about every requirement you may have, and many of these plugins are free.
Cons
Con Small community
The Metalsmith community is still fairly small compared to the more popular options. This results in a lack of learning resources and difficulty finding support from experienced users. However, a slack group has recently been started.
Con Not client enabled API chaining
According to the spec on API chaining, the API request/response need to associate an API object to an corresponding controller/action/uri to be able to validate and handle the request/response and the datasets.
Without that, the consuming client service cannot properly validate or relate the datasets from one to the other. Links have no relational value and the api object creates the relationship between the datasets while maintaining an api/dataset relationship with the corresponding controller/action/uri
As such, the current methodology supported would not be able to be called by the client not supported by the client in a RESTFUL manner
Con Post must has category else it will be labeled as uncategorized
Con Freemium
Plugin cannot be used, custom html/css, Date Permalink cannot changed on free wordpress
Con Slow Speed
Navigating between action took around 3-5 seconds and longer for bulk action.