Eleventy: What does eleventy solve compared to Jekyll ?

[belhassen07]

As a jekyll alternative, I'm curious about the problem that this SSG solve. Any thing in particular? thanks

[scottishstoater]

Personally, the main thing for me is that it's written in JavaScript and not Ruby. I'm more proficient with JavaScript and it's eco-system than I am with the Ruby. This allows me to work faster using the eco-system I know.

There's no hostility within the Eleventy community towards Jekyll, probably the opposite. I think the majority of people used and cherished Jekyll for a long time but sometimes projects come around and allow you to re-align and re-think, that's what Eleventy done for me.

😊

[ogdenstudios]

I switched my personal blog from Jekyll to Eleventy and found great success. I still maintain a few client sites in Jekyll I'm not going to migrate over (at least, not for free ;) ). Here's what I've experienced:

Pros:

• Eleventy has faster build times.
• All of my dependencies are through npm, which is much easier to manage than ruby versions and gemsets, IMO
• Eleventy is less opinionated about my project structure. There are fewer workarounds I have to do for custom file structure. Jekyll made me jump through more hoops
• Out-of-the-box support for more templating languages. I prefer nunjucks over liquid, so it was nice to move over (and pretty painless).
• Out-of-the-box support for more data types

Cons:

• Jekyll treated sass as a first class citizen. Spent more time configuring that on Eleventy than I did with Jekyll.
• The build pipeline can get a little fragmented. Since there are more ways to do things, I end up running multiple processes instead of just eleventy serve. In Jekyll, the serve command was pretty much all I needed on development, but I think plenty of Jekyll builds have their own complexities.

I'm a Rails guy, so I don't shy away from writing ruby. The switch from ruby to js was a non-issue for me, but I know it's a huge benefit for JS devs who want to write everything in JavaScript. We are clearly in the middle of a JavaScript boom, so it's probably a smart idea to bet on JS, which I think is what the Eleventy site talks about as well.

[zachleat]

Thank you for the answers everyone!

[zachleat]

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[dinhanhthi]

One thing 11ty is not good as jekyll is the --incremental feature. On the newest version of Jekyll, when working locally, you can edit and save many time you want, the site will know ehich file is changed and build only that file in comparision with the others.In 11ty, with the --watch (or --serve), 1 file changes, the whole site re-build, it takes so much time and resources to wait. I don't like 11ty in this aspect. The rest is wonderful with the flexibility you can make over jekyll.

[Ryuno-Ki]

You might want to upvote #1109 :-)