Harp and Docsify are both open source static site generators written in JavaScript, but that's where the similarities end. See the full comparison of Harp and Docsify.
| Property | Harp | Docsify |
|---|---|---|
| Language | JavaScript | JavaScript |
| Templates | EJS, Jade | Markdown, Vue |
| License | MIT | MIT |
Harp is a static web server that also serves Jade, Markdown, EJS, Less, Stylus, Sass, and CoffeeScript as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without any configuration. It supports the beloved layout/partial paradigm and it has flexible metadata and global objects for traversing the file system and injecting custom data into templates. Optionally, Harp can also compile your project down to static assets for hosting behind any valid HTTP server.
Pre-compilers are becoming extremely powerful and shipping front-ends as static assets has many upsides. It's simple, it's easy to maintain, it's low risk, easy to scale, and requires low cognitive overhead. I wanted a lightweight web server that was powerful enough for me to abandon web frameworks for dead simple front-end publishing.
| | Language Superset | Whitespace Sensitive | | -------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | HTML | EJS | Jade, Markdown | | CSS | LESS, Sass (SCSS) | Stylus | | JavaScript | (TBD) | CoffeeScript |
docsify generates your documentation website on the fly. Unlike GitBook, it does not generate static html files. Instead, it smartly loads and parses your Markdown files and displays them as a website.
Simple and lightweight (~21kB gzipped) No statically built html files Multiple themes