We’ve had some interesting conversations lately spurred by the steady march of Javascript frameworks into the JAMstack space. Both Nuxt (Vue) and Next (React) are soon releasing full-static mode. It’s nice knowing you can use one tool to build nearly anything. What’s more, these frameworks tend to do a lot for you out-of-the box and have huge communities to help you with most any issue. And “hydration!”

Yet, none of this invalidates the pure static site generators, like Hugo or Eleventy. They are faster to build and extremely capable (we even use Vue and React in our Hugo sites). They are also very stable, eschew unnecessary complexity, and only generate the code you want to deliver.

This isn’t a competition, it’s a choice. I feel the camps dividing and that’s not likely good. If I’ve learned anything working in web development, it’s to not limit yourself to one way of thinking. Your most-favorite-greatest-tool today may be easily cast off tomorrow. As Brian Rinaldi points out “JAMstack is more about how you build your site not the ingredients of it.”

Continue the conversation in our Slack.