When comparing JBake vs Nanoc, the Slant community recommends Nanoc for most people. In the question“What are the best static site generators?” Nanoc is ranked 8th while JBake is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Nanoc is:
Nanoc is a good choice if you need to support a site with a more complex structure than a simple blog. Nanoc is more agnostic to the types of pages you have, and allows you to do finer tuned refinements like customizing the URL structure.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Server included
Localhost server is included and can be used to preview content during editing process.
Pro Blog Aware
RSS feed, archive and tag support. Posts/Topics are a first-class citizen in jbake.
Pro Runs on / Control from the JVM
The site generator is just a specific usage of the JBake Java API. As such, jbake is easily integrated into other JVM software.
Pro Typical inputs
Markdown, asciidoc, plain HTML is supported
Pro Open Source (MIT License)
boosts permissive MIT License.
Pro Flexibly built
Nanoc is a good choice if you need to support a site with a more complex structure than a simple blog. Nanoc is more agnostic to the types of pages you have, and allows you to do finer tuned refinements like customizing the URL structure.
Pro Extensibile
Nanoc has a modular architecture which makes it easier to incorporate plugins and functionality from other projects as well as extend functionality.
Pro Helps you create multilingual sites
Nanoc takes multilingual sites into consideration and has features to make translations easier to implement.
Pro Unit testing integration
Nanoc has a check command to run tests against your site and make sure it meets requirements you define.
There are built in checks to validate HTML and CSS, as well as validating internal and external links.
Pro Works well with compile to languages
Nanoc is friendly with different CSS and HTML preprocessors, so you can easily use SASS, LESS, HAML, Markdown and more.
Cons
Con Runs on the JVM
JVM is a double-edged sword (startup time, memory usage, CPU overhead, ...) which might be considered overkill for a static site generator.