Eleventy (11ty)
A lightweight, Node.js-based static-site-generator that compiles template files
into pre-rendered HTML in a _site/ folder, without requiring a JS framework.
Summary drawn from its homepage (our source).
Design philosophy
- Simplicity / zero-config: sensible defaults, no config required, extensible when needed.
- Doesn’t hold content hostage: no custom content format; easy migration.
- Doesn’t inject its own markup into pages — author keeps full control of the HTML.
- Progressive enhancement over framework dependency; template languages are decoupled from the tool.
Differentiators
- 13+ template syntaxes in one project: HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, JavaScript, TypeScript, WebC, and more — vs. competitors locked to one ecosystem.
Performance
- Builds 4,000 Markdown files in 1.93s — per its benchmark, ~12× faster than astro and ~37× faster than Next.js. (Build-time speed; a different axis from astro‘s runtime core-web-vitals claim.)
Adoption
Powers sites for NASA, CERN, W3C, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft. ~18.6M downloads, ~19,700 GitHub stars. Listed in awesome-static-generators as the “simpler static site generator.”