Best Static Site Generators 2026

TL;DR

Astro for content sites; Next.js for hybrid apps; Eleventy for pure simplicity. Astro (~2M weekly downloads) pioneered Islands Architecture — ship zero JavaScript by default, hydrate only interactive components. Next.js (~9M) is the SSG + SSR powerhouse with App Router and ISR. Eleventy (~200K) is the purist's choice — no build overhead, any template language, pure HTML output. For blogs, docs, and marketing sites in 2026, Astro is the fastest-growing and most compelling choice. Pick based on what you're building, not what's popular.

Package Health

Package	Weekly Downloads	Bundle Size	Last Release	Maintained
astro	~2M	N/A (build tool)	2026	Yes — active
next	~9M	N/A (build tool)	2026	Yes — active
@11ty/eleventy	~200K	N/A (build tool)	2025	Yes — active
gatsby	~150K	N/A (build tool)	2025	Maintenance mode

Gatsby is effectively out of the running in 2026 — Netlify acquired it and activity has dropped significantly. The real competition is between Astro, Next.js, and Eleventy, each with a distinct philosophy.

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What Each Generator Is Trying to Solve

Before benchmarking build times or listing features, it helps to understand the core problem each generator is solving. Astro's thesis is that content sites have been over-engineered — every SPA framework ships JavaScript for content that could be static HTML. Next.js's thesis is the opposite: the boundary between static and dynamic is artificial, and a single framework should handle both. Eleventy's thesis is that generators add too much complexity, and a minimal tool that gets out of your way is better than a maximal one.

These are genuinely different philosophies, not just different implementations of the same idea. Choosing the wrong one for your project creates friction that compounds over time — a content blog that gradually needs dynamic features belongs in Next.js or Astro, not Eleventy. An app that starts with Next.js but is 95% static should use generateStaticParams aggressively, not switch to Eleventy for the blog section.

---

Astro: Islands Architecture and Zero-JS Default

Astro's defining feature is Islands Architecture — a term coined by Etsy's Katie Sylor-Miller and popularized by Preact's Jason Miller. The idea is simple: a page is a static HTML document with "islands" of interactivity scattered throughout. Each island is an independent component that hydrates on its own schedule. The rest of the page ships no JavaScript at all.

In practice, this means an Astro blog post page might ship zero kilobytes of JavaScript unless you add an interactive component. A search bar, a newsletter signup form, or a table of contents that highlights on scroll — each of these is an island that hydrates independently. The article text, the header, the sidebar, the footer? All static HTML.

---
// src/pages/blog/[slug].astro — static page generation
import { getCollection } from 'astro:content';
import Layout from '@/layouts/Layout.astro';
import type { GetStaticPaths } from 'astro';

export const getStaticPaths: GetStaticPaths = async () => {
  const posts = await getCollection('blog');
  return posts.map((post) => ({
    params: { slug: post.slug },
    props: { post },
  }));
};

const { post } = Astro.props;
const { Content, headings } = await post.render();
---

<Layout title={post.data.title} description={post.data.description}>
  <article>
    <h1>{post.data.title}</h1>
    <time>{post.data.publishedAt.toLocaleDateString()}</time>
    <!-- Zero JS shipped for this content -->
    <Content />
  </article>
  <!-- This React component ONLY hydrates when visible in viewport -->
  <TableOfContents headings={headings} client:visible />
</Layout>

The client:visible directive is the key. Without it, the component renders to static HTML on the server and ships no JavaScript. The client: directives give you fine-grained control:

---
import HeavyChart from '../components/HeavyChart.jsx';
import SearchBar from '../components/SearchBar.tsx';
import VideoPlayer from '../components/VideoPlayer.vue';
---

<!-- Static HTML — no JS shipped to browser -->
<HeavyChart data={chartData} />

<!-- Hydrate immediately when page JS loads -->
<SearchBar client:load />

<!-- Hydrate only when component enters viewport (lazy) -->
<HeavyChart data={chartData} client:visible />

<!-- Hydrate only when browser is idle (non-critical) -->
<VideoPlayer src={videoUrl} client:idle />

<!-- Render to HTML only — never hydrate (static islands) -->
<StaticMap coordinates={coords} />

Content Collections: Typed Markdown at Scale

Astro's Content Collections API is the best-in-class solution for managing structured content. You define a schema using Zod, and every Markdown/MDX file in the collection is validated against it at build time. Type errors in frontmatter become compile errors, not runtime surprises.

// src/content/config.ts
import { defineCollection, z } from 'astro:content';

const blog = defineCollection({
  type: 'content',
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    description: z.string(),
    publishedAt: z.coerce.date(),
    author: z.string(),
    tags: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
    featured: z.boolean().default(false),
    image: z.object({
      src: z.string(),
      alt: z.string(),
    }).optional(),
  }),
});

export const collections = { blog };

This is genuinely useful for large content sites. When you have 500 blog posts and someone adds a post with a missing required field, you catch it at build time on CI, not when a user hits a broken page. Next.js has no equivalent built-in — you'd need to layer in Contentlayer or a CMS.

Framework Agnosticism

Astro is the only major SSG that lets you mix React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, and Preact components in a single project. This sounds like a toy feature, but it has real use cases: migrating from one framework to another incrementally, or using a component library that's only available for one framework while writing new components in another.

npm install @astrojs/react @astrojs/vue @astrojs/svelte

After that, .jsx, .tsx, .vue, and .svelte files all work in Astro pages. Each framework's runtime is only loaded when that framework is actually used on a page.

---

Next.js: Full-Power SSG with Hybrid Capability

Next.js (~9M weekly downloads) is not primarily a static site generator — it's a full-stack React framework that happens to support static generation. This distinction matters. Next.js is the right choice when your "static site" needs server-side rendering for some routes, API routes, authentication, edge middleware, or ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration). If none of those apply to you, you're paying for capability you don't use.

The App Router (stable since Next.js 13.4) changed how static generation works. The old getStaticProps and getStaticPaths pattern is replaced by generateStaticParams and async Server Components. The mental model is: every Server Component is statically rendered at build time by default, unless you opt into dynamic rendering.

// app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx
import { getPostBySlug, getAllPosts } from '@/lib/blog';
import { notFound } from 'next/navigation';
import { MDXRemote } from 'next-mdx-remote/rsc';

// Tell Next.js which slugs to pre-render at build time
export async function generateStaticParams() {
  const posts = await getAllPosts();
  return posts.map((post) => ({ slug: post.slug }));
}

export async function generateMetadata({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) {
  const post = await getPostBySlug(params.slug);
  if (!post) return {};
  return {
    title: post.title,
    description: post.description,
    openGraph: { images: [post.image] },
  };
}

export default async function PostPage({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) {
  const post = await getPostBySlug(params.slug);
  if (!post) notFound();

  return (
    <article>
      <h1>{post.title}</h1>
      <MDXRemote source={post.content} />
    </article>
  );
}

ISR: The Killer Feature for Large Sites

Incremental Static Regeneration is where Next.js has no peer. With ISR, you pre-render pages at build time but revalidate them on a schedule — or on-demand via a webhook. For an e-commerce site with 100,000 product pages, you can't pre-render all of them at build time. ISR lets you render the top 1,000 at build time, serve the rest on-demand, and revalidate all of them every hour.

// Revalidate this page every 3600 seconds
export const revalidate = 3600;

// Or trigger revalidation via API route
// app/api/revalidate/route.ts
import { revalidatePath } from 'next/cache';

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const { path } = await req.json();
  revalidatePath(path);
  return Response.json({ revalidated: true });
}

No other SSG has this capability. Eleventy and Astro require a full rebuild to update content. This is the reason Next.js dominates for large-scale content operations.

---

Eleventy: The Purist's Choice

Eleventy (~200K weekly downloads) does one thing: take content files and template files, combine them, and output HTML. There is no JavaScript runtime shipped to browsers by default — not even a small one. There is no framework, no component model, no hydration. There is only HTML, generated at build time, from whatever template language you prefer.

Eleventy supports Nunjucks, Liquid, Handlebars, Mustache, JavaScript template literals, HTML, Markdown, and WebC. You can mix them freely. This template-agnostic approach is unusual and powerful — if your team knows Nunjucks from a Django background, you can write Eleventy templates in Nunjucks. If they prefer plain JavaScript, you can write templates as JavaScript functions.

// .eleventy.js — the entire configuration in 20 lines
module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addFilter('dateFormat', (date) => {
    return date.toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
      year: 'numeric',
      month: 'long',
      day: 'numeric',
    });
  });

  eleventyConfig.addCollection('posts', (collection) => {
    return collection.getFilteredByGlob('src/blog/**/*.md')
      .sort((a, b) => b.date - a.date);
  });

  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy('src/static');

  return {
    dir: { input: 'src', output: '_site' },
  };
};

The simplicity is the feature. An Eleventy project has no webpack config, no babel config, no framework-specific conventions to learn. You write HTML templates and Markdown files; Eleventy combines them. The output is pure, static HTML that works on any hosting platform with zero configuration.

---
title: My Blog Post
date: 2026-03-08
tags: [javascript, web]
layout: post.njk
---

Write your Markdown here.
Eleventy supports Nunjucks, Liquid, Handlebars, HTML, JS — any template language.

Eleventy's weakness is interactive UI. Adding a search component, a dark mode toggle, or any client-side JavaScript requires rolling your own solution — there's no component model. For simple marketing sites and documentation, this is fine. For anything with meaningful interactivity, you'll end up gluing in Alpine.js or writing vanilla JS, which gets messy at scale.

---

Build Performance Comparison

Build performance matters at scale. A 10-second build for a 50-page site is irrelevant; a 10-minute build for a 10,000-page site is a deployment blocker. Here's approximate real-world build performance:

SSG	1K pages	10K pages	Incremental	Hot reload
Eleventy	~1s	~8s	Partial	Instant
Astro	~3s	~25s	No	Fast
Next.js (SSG)	~8s	~60s	ISR (runtime)	Fast (Turbopack)
Gatsby	~15s	~120s+	Partial	Slow

Eleventy wins on raw build speed because it has no framework runtime to bundle, no component tree to reconcile, and no JavaScript to transform. It's essentially a template engine that reads files — fast by design. Astro is slower because it processes component files and handles Islands bundling. Next.js is slowest for pure static because it's running a React Server Component pipeline with webpack or Turbopack behind it.

For very large sites (50K+ pages), Eleventy and Next.js with ISR are the only viable options. Eleventy builds incrementally; Next.js serves the long tail on-demand and revalidates. Astro currently lacks native ISR, though its hosted platform (Astro DB and Astro Actions) is adding more server capabilities.

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When to Choose

Scenario	Best Pick	Why
Blog, docs, marketing site	Astro	Islands, Content Collections, zero-JS default
Mix of static + dynamic routes	Next.js	SSG + SSR in one framework
100K+ page content site	Next.js	ISR handles the long tail
Zero JS, maximum simplicity	Eleventy	No framework overhead
App + marketing site (one codebase)	Next.js	One framework, shared auth
Mix React/Vue/Svelte components	Astro	Only SSG with multi-framework support
E-commerce (ISR + edge)	Next.js	ISR + Vercel edge catalog
Personal site, no build tooling	Eleventy	~1s builds, any template language
MDX-heavy content with types	Astro	Content Collections + Zod schema
Existing React codebase adding blog	Next.js	No framework switch needed

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The Recommendation

For most content sites in 2026, Astro is the default choice. It has the best developer experience for content-first projects, the best performance characteristics (zero JS by default), and the most actively improving feature set. Content Collections with Zod schemas is a feature that genuinely saves time and prevents bugs at scale.

Next.js wins when you need hybrid rendering — static pages that coexist with authenticated routes, API endpoints, or ISR. It's also the right choice if your team is already in the React/Next.js ecosystem and switching frameworks has a cost. The App Router's static generation is excellent; you're not sacrificing anything by staying in Next.js.

Eleventy wins for projects where simplicity is the primary constraint — personal sites, small team blogs, and documentation for tools that don't need interactive components. The zero-overhead philosophy produces blazing-fast builds and sites that work anywhere.

Compare full package health and API details for Astro vs Next.js on PkgPulse. You can also explore all available packages on PkgPulse to compare download trends and bundle sizes.