Poops vs Jekyll & Eleventy

Poops is Jekyll-inspired and says so: front matter, _layouts, collections, a _data directory, pagination. If you know Jekyll, most of Building pages will read as familiar.

The difference is what happens when the site needs a stylesheet and thirty lines of TypeScript. With Jekyll or Eleventy that is a second toolchain — a bundler, its config, two watch processes and a script whose only job is sequencing two tools that do not know about each other. With Poops it is two more keys in the file you already have:

{
  "markup": { "in": "src/markup", "out": "dist" },
  "styles": [{ "in": "src/scss/index.scss", "out": "dist/css/styles.css" }],
  "scripts": [{ "in": "src/js/main.ts", "out": "dist/js/main.js" }],
  "watch": ["src"],
  "livereload": true
}

One command builds all three, one watcher rebuilds whichever changed, and the page reloads once.

Where the three stand

What Poops wins

The asset side is not a second project. SCSS, TypeScript, PostCSS, responsive images and pre-rendered React components are keys in the same file as the pages. On the other two, each of those is a plugin with its own conventions, or a bundler running beside the site generator with its own config, its own watcher and its own failure mode when the two disagree about output paths.

No Ruby, no gems. No Gemfile, no bundle exec, no native extension that stops compiling on a new OS release. npm i -D poops and the toolchain is one package.

The machine-readable output is config, not five plugins. sitemap.xml, robots.txt, llms.txt, a search index, a nav tree and JSON-LD are keys with defaults — one convention to learn instead of five, and nothing to keep in step when one of them stops being maintained.

Live reload that keeps your place. A changed stylesheet is swapped into the page in dev; scroll and state survive. Both of the others reload the page.

What Jekyll and Eleventy still win

Ecosystem and answers. A decade of themes, plugins and an existing answer for the thing you are stuck on. Poops has this site and one maintainer.

Eleventy's template flexibility. It renders whatever you throw at it and lets you write data files and shortcodes as plain JavaScript. Poops gives you two engines and an interface for a third — enough for most sites, and plainly less.

Jekyll on GitHub Pages with no CI at all. Push Markdown to a branch, GitHub builds it. Poops needs a workflow — twenty lines, but twenty lines more than nothing.

Ruby, if your team writes Ruby. A Jekyll site in a Rails shop is one language for everybody.

Which to pick

Decided? The concept-by-concept mappings, including the parts with no equivalent, are in Migrating from Jekyll and Migrating from Eleventy.