Statac vs Eleventy

Eleventy is a static site generator written in JavaScript, which runs on Node. It was first released in January 2018, and is built for flexibility: many template languages in one site, data from many places, and settings in JavaScript with npm to hand.

The project is now called Build Awesome, the name its version 4, now in alpha, will carry. The project still publishes and documents version 3.1.7, the stable release compared here, as Eleventy.

Statac is a friendlier static site generator for personal websites. Everything is included, so you can tinker with your site if you want to, but you don’t have to. It is made for the IndieWeb and the social web: feeds, webmentions and social cards are part of it, with no plugins.

At a glance

	Statac	Eleventy
Written in	Rust	JavaScript
What you install	One program	Node 18 or later, then the npm package and its 113 dependencies, 20.5 MB in all by its own count
First released	October 2026	January 2018
Version compared	0.7.0	3.1.7
Licence	MIT or Apache-2.0	MIT
Templates	Jinja, as MiniJinja implements it	Nunjucks, Liquid, WebC, JavaScript and others, several in one site
`statac import` reads its sites		Yes

Where they are alike

No JavaScript on a page unless you put it there.
Markdown with front matter, layouts, data files, tags, pagination, permalinks, and template tags in the content: Eleventy’s shortcodes, Statac’s snippet calls.
URLs that end in / rather than .html, by default.
A preview that reloads when you save.
AVIF copies of images. Eleventy’s Image plugin can rewrite each page’s <img> elements to use them.

What Statac does differently

Settled rather than assembled. Statac makes the choices: one template language, one way to call a snippet, YAML front matter, and no code in the settings. Eleventy leaves those choices open, and that is its strength.
Built in: resized images, maths as MathML, redirects, drafts and scheduled posts, and several languages, with month names, quotation marks and digits for eight languages from the Unicode CLDR. Search, code colours, feeds, social cards and webmentions need setting up first. Eleventy has official plugins for images, code colours, feeds and languages, and a recipe for drafts.

Problems at the file, the line and the exact text, with a suggestion if there is a good one, and a page on each kind. Statac checks templates before it builds any page. From statac check:

warning  Broken link: nothing is published at `/about-us/`
  content/posts/first-post/index.md, line 7
   7 │ Read more [about us](/about-us/).
     │                      ^^^^^^^^^^
  Did you mean `/about/`?
  More: https://statac.dev/e/broken-link/

Statac checks every link within the site on every build, down to the heading: see how Statac checks links.
The debug panel. While statac serve runs, the debug panel lists every name a template can write on the page open, with its value and the file and line it comes from. Eleventy’s debugging docs give the log filter and DEBUG=Eleventy*.

Why you might choose Eleventy

Flexibility, in code. Any template language, several in one site; a data cascade from front matter, data files and computed data; collections, filters, transforms and plugins in a few lines of JavaScript; any npm package. If a site needs something Statac doesn’t do, Eleventy probably lets you write it. Statac has no plugins and no code in its settings, by design: its hooks run commands before or after a build.
Plugins and starters: official plugins for images, feeds, code colours, navigation and bundling, a Vite plugin, and long lists of community plugins and starters. Statac has no starters: its docs give templates and snippets to copy.
Feeds with no template to write: the feed plugin makes an Atom, RSS or JSON feed. Statac builds each feed from a template in the site, and its docs give Atom and RSS templates.
Components and the JavaScript world: WebC, <is-land> to load a component’s script only when it is needed, templates in TypeScript, JSX or MDX, and the front-end tools you already use. Statac has no components, and bundles no JavaScript.
Years of use and a large community: 4.7 million downloads of its core package in 2025, and over 3,400 people on its Discord, by its 2025 review. Statac was first released on 10 October 2026, and has one maintainer.

Statac also doesn’t number code lines or pick lines out, check links to other sites, or minify. Pages are Markdown or HTML, front matter is YAML, and data files are YAML or JSON. A redirect is an HTML page, not a line in a host’s redirect file. The docs have no guides for particular hosts: any web host can serve _site. Statac’s macOS packages aren’t notarised, so a package you download by hand needs one more step.

Moving from Eleventy

From Eleventy lists what statac import reads from an Eleventy site, and Arriving from another tool explains the import. The import lists pages in a template language, such as .njk or .11ty.js files, in IMPORT.md rather than converting them.

Versions compared

Checked on 26 October 2026 against Statac 0.7.0 and Eleventy 3.1.7 (15 October 2026), from Eleventy’s documentation. A later release of either, Build Awesome 4 among them, may change what this page says.