When comparing Assemble vs Roots, the Slant community recommends Assemble for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Assemble is ranked 15th while Roots is ranked 18th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro No dependencies on Ruby, Python... just JavaScript
Pro Built on node.js
Pro Powered by a popular template engine Handlebars
Handlebars is the default template engine for Assemble, but you can add any template any you want.
Pro Highly customizable
Pro Markdown support
Pro Highly extensible
Assemble can be extended with plugins/middleware, helpers and mixins.
Pro Nested layout support
Assemble makes it easy to work with layouts. Layouts are used to "wrap" pages with common page elements, such as a header, footer etc. You can even nest layouts!
Pro Use mainstream build tools Grunt or Gulp
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.
Cons
Con Documentation can be hard to navigate
Especially for someone new to Assemble, it can be difficult to find what you're looking for in the documentation.
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.