Bridgetown vs Harp
Bridgetown
bridgetownrb.comHarp
harp.shSide by side
| Figure | Bridgetown | Harp |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static site generators | 8.0 (#12) | 7.8 (#16) |
| Content sources | markdown | markdown |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The official plugin directory lists integrations and extensions for Directus, Cloudinary, Notion, Plausible Analytics, Sequel, and Lit SSR plus hydration. | Harp can be used as middleware in an Express and Node.js application as an asset pipeline. |
| Local preview server | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The documentation directs users who need help to Bridgetown community channels, including Discord chat. | The documentation offers platform personal support, an IRC community, GitHub issues, and Stack Overflow; it also says the Harp Platform has a free trial. |
| Supported languages | Ruby,JavaScript | Node.js,JavaScript,CoffeeScript |
In their own words
Bridgetown
Bridgetown is a free site generator for building static sites, full-stack applications or a combination of both. It compiles Markdown, layouts and components into HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Static publishing features include permalinks, Git-based content deployment, atomic builds, data pipelines and pagination. Collections, taxonomies and content relationships organize material, which can be generated at build time or in real time and connected to a headless CMS or other web APIs. For full-stack applications, its Roda backend supports dynamic routes, server APIs and database connections such as PostgreSQL. Templates can use ERB, Serbea, Streamlined or Liquid; components support modular views, web components and Markdown inclusion. The frontend build system includes esbuild and PostCSS, and custom Ruby plugins can extend builds and content. Static output can be deployed anywhere that serves HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Bridgetown supports Ruby and JavaScript, and its setup guides cover macOS, Fedora and Ubuntu Linux, and Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. Installation requires GCC and Make, Ruby 3.3 or newer, and Node 22.21 or newer.