Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Metalsmith VS CMark

Compare Metalsmith VS CMark and see what are their differences

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Metalsmith logo Metalsmith

An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator.

CMark logo CMark

CMark is CommonMark implementation based on the C reference, which is a rationalized version of the Markdown syntax coming with the spec.
  • Metalsmith Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-12
  • CMark Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-01

Metalsmith features and specs

  • Flexible Architecture
    Metalsmith has a simple, yet powerful, plugin-based architecture that allows developers to easily customize and extend functionality to suit their specific needs.
  • Minimalistic Core
    Its lightweight core handles only the basic functions, which ensures that the site generation is fast and efficient, allowing you to only add what you need through plugins.
  • Ease of Use
    The straightforward configuration and operation of Metalsmith make it accessible for users, with minimal setup required to get started.
  • Active Community
    A vibrant community provides ample plugins and support, making it easier to find existing solutions and get help when you encounter issues.
  • Language Flexibility
    Being written in JavaScript and built on Node.js, it fits neatly within the modern web development ecosystem and is accessible to JavaScript developers.

Possible disadvantages of Metalsmith

  • Steeper Learning Curve for Beginners
    Users without prior experience in static site generators or those unfamiliar with Node.js might find the initial setup and understanding of its plugin-based system challenging.
  • Limited Official Documentation
    While there is basic documentation available, the official resources can be sparse, which might make it difficult for new users to get up to speed quickly without community assistance.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    With its heavy reliance on plugins, projects can become tricky to manage over time, especially if key plugins become obsolete or unmaintained.
  • Manual Plugin Integration
    Since all additional features need to be added through plugins, users must invest time in searching for, evaluating, and integrating these plugins to get desired functionalities.
  • Not Opinionated
    While this is a strength for flexibility, it can also be a downside as it doesn't provide a structured path for common use cases, requiring more decisions from the user.

CMark features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Metalsmith videos

Product Review 29 Badger Metalsmith Paint System

More videos:

  • Review - METALSMITHING FAQ! Answers to most commonly asked questions from you guys!
  • Review - DRAWING & SAWING jewelry design in real time. Jewelry metalsmithing

CMark videos

No CMark videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Metalsmith and CMark)
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
Tool
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Metalsmith and CMark. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

CMark might be a bit more popular than Metalsmith. We know about 6 links to it since March 2021 and only 6 links to Metalsmith. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Metalsmith mentions (6)

  • Top ten popular static site generators (SSG) in 2023
    Metalsmith โ€” the best customizable SSG. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • who is self-hosting a static website and what are you using to build it?
    I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Configuration error even if nothing changed since last successful deploy
    Const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') Const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') Const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') Const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') Const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' ... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Why I built my own static site generator
    A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/ It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself. For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading. But... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
  • What to use? Frustrated over choice...
    I really like using Metalsmith as a static site generator myself. It's incredibly lightweight and you can extend it in any direction you like if you feel the need. But if you want an out-of-the-box solution, grab something like Gatsby or Hugo. This site has a big list of them. Source: over 4 years ago
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CMark mentions (6)

  • Why Is This Site Built with C
    Using a portable minimal markdown dependency (such as cmark [1]) I think markdown can be quite a low barrier here. I personally do similar to what you have described on my blog, with an additional cmark conversion and find it quite simple [2]. [1] https://github.com/commonmark/cmark. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Ask HN: What's the simplest static website generator?
    I use GNU make. Write content in markdown, feed it to https://github.com/commonmark/cmark to create html. I intended to splice files together using xslt but echo and cat written in the makefile sufficed. I'm not totally sure I'd recommend that but I do like the markdown => html flow. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Building a Personal Internet from Markdown Files
    I seem to be in the middle of trying to build something similar to this. I want it to run on an android phone but otherwise the same sort of idea, offline-first information I want access to. There's some weirdness around android browsers refusing to load html from the phone itself on security grounds. The OP uses a "progressive web app" which seems to be the proper way to do this at some point in the past, but... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Using Rust with Elixir for code reuse and performance
    Yeah no doubt it, although in this case the C implementation has been a long running project that's under the official commonmark GitHub repo at https://github.com/commonmark/cmark. But I think the most important thing here is an Elixir NIF already exists to use it. The blog post as is leaves readers having to implement ~100 lines of Elixir code to use the Rust version because the authors of blog post didn't... - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago
  • How do I link and use a c library?
    I'm confused about how to use a c library (specifically, cmark) from zig. Source: about 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Metalsmith and CMark, you can also consider the following products

GatsbyJS - Blazing-fast static site generator for React

CrystalMark - CrystalMark is a full included benchmark application that can be utilized for surveying the execution and capacities of a PC.

Wintersmith - Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator built on top of node.js

Bazel - Bazel is a tool that automates software builds and tests.

Hexo - A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js

fio - Generate I/O for benchmarking, stress testing, verification or workload reproduction purposes.