Gatsby vs Zola

Gatsby is an open-source, React-based framework for building websites such as eCommerce and marketing sites, blogs, and documentation. It supports JavaScript and Node.js, and pages can be rendered with Static Site Generation, Deferred Static Generation, or Server-Side Rendering. Its GraphQL data layer gives page components a consistent way to request content, API, and service data. Gatsby also provides code-splitting, image optimization, lazy loading, and webpack. Its plugin library covers areas including CMS, styling, analytics, e-commerce, payments, authentication, and search; official integrations include hosting providers and content management systems. Gatsby 5 requires Node 18 and React 18. The open-source framework is free. A separate Free plan costs nothing and includes a 300-credit monthly limit, unlimited deploy previews, and custom domains with SSL. Personal costs $9 a month and Pro costs $20 a month; Enterprise pricing is custom. Projects pause when monthly usage limits are reached.

Zola is a static site generator that turns Markdown content into static HTML for blogs, knowledge bases and landing pages. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and can also be self-hosted. Distributed as a single executable, it includes Sass compilation and syntax highlighting. Its maker says an average site generates in less than a second, including those steps. Because the output is static files, a published site does not need a database or server to manage. Zola uses CommonMark with added support for footnotes, GitHub-flavored tables, task lists and strikethrough. It uses the Tera template engine and can create multilingual sites with language-specific configuration and content. Users can define taxonomies and generate pages for their terms, such as categories, genres or tags. Search can run without servers or third parties, and indexing is configurable. Deployment guides cover Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages. The plan is free. Windows installation documentation says Zola does not work in PowerShell ISE. Code introduced after version 0.22 is licensed under EUPL-1.2; earlier code remains under MIT.