JAMstacks - Gatsby & 11ty

After spending a month migrating two WordPress sites to Gatsby and 11ty, here are a few of my thoughts.

Recently I've converted my blog to Gatsby. In the process, my friends told me to check out 11ty as well. So to learn 11ty I decided to convert my mom's business website.

The projects were quite different, so it is hard to compare apples to apples. For one, I did a lot of migration of blog posts in Gatsby. I wrote a few custom scripts to help with this. I started with another blog platform and molded my layout to match the blog I cloned. After trying to move it to an 11ty blog, it didn't work as well because of the convention I used for the Gatsby blog. Had I started with 11ty then I don't think it would have been difficult, I would have just used different conventions.

Gatsby seems more mature with lots of 3rd party plugins. I really like their image transformer. It is silly but that was the main selling point for me to try it out.

Other than that, I think any further websites I create using the JAMstack will be done in 11ty. Here are some high-level reasons I preferred 11ty.

I hate JSX. I'm not saying it is bad or wrong, I just hate working with it. It feels unnatural to me. There is some context-switching involved between working with JSX and HTML.
I love Nunjucks (notice the j in there - I overlooked that at first). A week ago I never thought I'd say that. But then I read somewhere that James Long, the creator of Prettier was the same person who created Nunjucks. It was said that he designed it after Jinja2. From what I understand, Jinja2 was modeled after Django templating. Having spent years using Django, all of a sudden it all made complete sense and I felt right at home using Nunjucks.
It was so easy mixing and matching HTML, Nunjucks, and Markdown. 11ty supports each of these and more and it was so simple throwing each of them in as desired.
I think is really cool that Gatsby generates a GraphQL API for you. I'm guessing you can do some powerful things with it. But, for what I was doing, it felt like overkill. 11ty's collection system seems simple and sufficient for most use cases.
Build times were much faster on my 11ty project. Yeah, my project was smaller, but I think the simplicity of the design lends itself to faster builds and deploys.

What I didn't like about 11ty:

The author seems to be a social warrior and so the header of the website is all about his favorite causes. I like the framework, but not all the liberal agendas being supported by the framework.