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 (figures as read 2026-05-30). Listed in awesome-static-generators as the “simpler static site generator.”
Re-verified 2026-08-04 (staleness queue)
Homepage re-read at 66 days past window. Two things changed, and one of them is not a version bump.
Version. Stable is v3.1.6, with v4.0.0-alpha.10 on the canary channel — so a major version is in pre-release. The v3.1.0 release (May 2025) advertised “11% faster and 22% smaller.”
It has been rebranded: “Eleventy is now Build Awesome” — the project now sits under Font Awesome’s umbrella, with a Build Awesome Pro tier and sponsorship programme alongside it. That is a governance and funding change, not a technical one, and it matters to this spoke’s standing question about who pays for a build tool. Recorded here; the synthesis question it bears on is left for a source that covers the move directly rather than a homepage banner.
Stability claim, unchanged and now with a number: 226 releases since December 2017, of which only three required developer changes. That is the strongest version of the low-churn argument this page has been making, and it is the project’s own count.
The design philosophy, differentiators and build-speed figures above were re-read and stand as written.