Comparison of Gatsby vs Next.js vs Hugo

Next.js

Next.js is a free and open source web application framework based on React.js, Node.js, webpack and Babel.js for building server-side rendered and/or static web applications using React.

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. Hugo takes data files, i18n bundles, configuration, templates for layouts, static files, and content written in Markdown and renders a static website. It is an open source project licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Legend
Icon	Feature Availability
Icon	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Poor (not possible)
Feature Availability	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Poor (not possible)
Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fair (needs customization or limited)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Poor (not possible)	Poor (not possible)

Performance
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Delivery Optimization
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Build your site as static files which can be deployed without a server.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Cache your site on a CDN distributed throughout the globe.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Use Google’s AMP’s static page format, which enables faster loads and are privileged in Google search results.
Payload optimization
	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Load images progressively by displaying a blurry placeholder image before loading the full heavyweight asset, thus preventing pages from appearing incomplete.

	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Enable modern browsers to load the right size of image assets given viewport size through responsive images.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Inline CSS within your rendered HTML in order to prevent blocking page load as occurs in the case of a separate CSS file.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Host fonts on your own server so you can load them from your local filesystem so that a page load-blocking request to external servers does not occur.
Progressive Web App (PWA)
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Provide offline access via service workers in Progressive Web Apps so that users on spotty connections can access your site.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Prefetch all the content needed to load the next link you click in the background while you browse the page as it loads.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Allow browsers to serve content locally without an extra network call when a user visits a previously visited page by fingerprinting static resources that aren’t expected to change.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Fetch only the code for the loaded page on page load as opposed to the code needed to run the entire application.

Developer Experience
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Maintainability and debuggability
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Reduce operations overhead by using serverless hosting that doesn’t require security or framework upgrades or accessing a live production server.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Click a Preview button or refresh the page to preview what your content looks like while writing or editing a piece of content.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
See UI changes without refreshing the page in your local development environment browser while editing content.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
See UI changes without refreshing the page in your local development environment browser while editing code.
Declarative rendering
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Plug and play internal or external third-party components from a shared codebase or component library.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Use a unidirectional data flow without complex interdependencies that are present in other data flow approaches like MVC in order to build complex front-end components.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)
Use declarative queries in GraphQL that are colocated with your components to retrieve only certain data in a certain shape. Gatsby also pulls data into the GraphQL API so you can query it in your local IDE or query constructor.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)
Use a hierarchical UI approach by declaratively passing properties down child trees in React, with faster debug cycles through the DevTools extension and element-by-element state comparisons.
Modern development practices
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Use asset pipelines, the compilers of the web stack, to transform images and discrete code into minified, raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that browsers can parse.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Use languages like Sass and LESS and libraries like Glamor and Aphrodite to colocate CSS with JavaScript and HTML in React in order to solve common problems in vanilla CSS like global namespacing, nondeterminism, dead code elimination, and minification.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)
Access modern JavaScript features including syntactic sugar, new language features, new data structures and types, and modularity.

Governance
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Security
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Protect your application from cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that could expose your site to attackers.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Enable access control through cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to prevent unwanted access through vectors such as distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Use environment variables so you can deploy configuration to hosting services without exposing them in your codebase.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Provide user authentication through an authentication provider that will permit access to sensitive areas of your application.
Design
	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Poor (not possible)
Use tools like Typography.js to make it easier to programmatically design your site by generating CSS that adheres to a certain intended design.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Poor (not possible)
Export application components for use in other applications such as Sketch, which has integrations like react-sketchapp for React components.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Poor (not possible)
Leverage component libraries in other applications like Sketch with integrations like react-sketchapp to accelerate the articulation of your style guide.

Accessibility
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Accessible markup
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Provide a baseline of progressive enhancement where all sites can be accessed as static HTML and CSS and where all fundamental functionality is preserved without JavaScript being enabled.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Leverage ARIA landmarks to provide semantic markers that indicate certain page elements for users of assistive and accessible technologies such as screen readers.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Introduce meaning to HTML to reinforce desired semantics and to aid the navigation of your site by users of assistive and accessible technologies such as screen readers.
Accessible defaults
	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Provide focus management on each page change through libraries such as @reach/router, an accessible routing library.

	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)	Poor (not possible)
Leverage a framework with a clear and robust accessibility statement explaining its position on accessibility and that it is a first-class consideration.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Leverage a framework with full compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Gatsby is partially compliant.

Documentation
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Tutorials and guides
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Read an introductory tutorial with a step-by-step process to help new users get started quickly.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Read a guide with a step-by-step process to help you source data from a data source such as a CMS.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to incorporate a CSS preprocessor such as Sass, LESS, or Stylus; and CSS-in-JS libraries like Glamor, or Aphrodite.
Development guides
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform routing and route management in the framework.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform testing and quality assurance such as linting within a development workflow.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform debugging and troubleshooting within a development workflow.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to improve performance benchmarks within the framework.
Feature addition guides
	Excellent (fully available)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add media assets such as image and video to your application.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add search capabilities and indexing to your application.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add analytics integration and segmentation to your application.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add authentication providers to gate access to your application.

	Excellent (fully available)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Fair (needs customization or limited)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform search engine optimization for your application.

Ecosystem
Category	Gatsby	Next.js	Hugo
Ecosystem
	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)
Leverage an existing component ecosystem such as React’s, which includes out-of-the-box component libraries and curated sets such as JSCoach.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Plug your application into static hosts such as Netlify, Render, or surge.sh. WordPress and Squarespace include built-in hosting.

	Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)	Fair (needs customization or limited)	Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a theme ecosystem with various options for your application to take on a custom look and feel. Jekyll has themes, and WordPress and Squarespace offer default theme selection.
Integrations
	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)	Poor (not possible)
Leverage a framework that has integrations off the shelf with more than 50 other systems.
Community
	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)	Poor (not possible)
Purchase items from a swag store to express your support of the framework community.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Poor (not possible)
Feel welcome and empowered to contribute within a community that has an official code of conduct governing all interactions.

	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)	Excellent (fully available)
Understand how to contribute to a community with a clear section in documentation for new contributors.

Comparison of Gatsby vs Next.js vs Hugo

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Hugo

Next.js