JAMstack Tools and The Spectrum of Classification

With the wonderful world of JAMstack getting big, all the categories of services and tools that help it along are as important as ever. There are static site generators, headless CMSs, and static file hosts.

I think those classifications are handy, and help conversations along. But there is a point where nuance is necessary and these classification buckets get a little leaky.

Note, these charts are just intended to paint a spectrum, not to be a comprehensive list of services.

Headless CMSs

A Headless CMS is a CMS that provides an admin area for creating and editing content, but offers no front-end to build the website from. All the content is accessed via APIs.

Imagine WordPress, which has an admin area, but it also has themes from which you build the website from on the server-side, with all kinds of PHP functions for you to use the content data. All that theming stuff is the “head”. So a headless CMS would be like WordPress with just the admin area. And indeed you can use it that way, as it offers APIs.

There is even more nuance here, as there are services that offer an admin area, but don’t actually store the data for you. Plus there is CMSs that are hosted for you, and CMSs where you have to bring your own hosting. Let’s have a peak.

Service	Headless?	Hosting	Notes
Contentful	Yes	Cloud	A classic headless CMS
Sanity			JSON data structure, accessed via APIs, custom admin area is self-hosted
Cockpit		Self	Comes with admin UI
Strapi
KeystoneJS			All code, not even an admin UI
WordPress	Sorta – Usually used with head	Self or Cloud	Has a head, but you don’t have to use it, you choose to only use APIs to access content if you wish.
Drupal		Self
CraftCMS		Self	Specifically has a headless mode and GraphQL API. Craft Cloud will bring a cloud-hosted headless varient
NetlifyCMS	Sorta – Doesn’t actually store content, just helps edit it.		GUI for Git-hosted Markdown
Forestry		Cloud
Joomla	No	Self	A classic headed CMS
Squarespace		Cloud	Site builder, meant to build hosted/headed sites
Wix

Static Site Hosts

This is tricky to talk about because literally, any web host will host static files, and probably do an OK job of it. I think it’s most useful to consider hosts that only do static hosting on purpose because it means they can optimize for that situation do other useful things.

Service	Notes
Netlify	The gold standard in static file hosts. Developer conveniences galore.
Cloudflare Workers Sites	CDN-first static file hosting alongside a cloud functions service.
Firebase Hosting	Firebase is a whole suite of sub-products, but the hosting in particular is static and on a CDN.
GitHub Pages	Static file host, but will also run Jekyll and other actions. Is not a CDN.
Neocities	Static file host with online editor and community.
S3	Raw file storage. Can be configured to be a web host. Not a CDN unless you put CloudFront in front of it.
Bluehost	Not really a static file host.
MediaTemple
Hostgator

Sometimes you’ll see people trying to use stuff like Dropbox or Google Drive to do static file hosting (for a website), but I’ve found these services generally ultimately don’t like that and prevent the use for that. If it works today, fine, but I wouldn’t count on any of them long term.

Static Site Generators

You would think this category would be straightforward, without much spectrum. A static site generator takes input and makes statically generated pages that can render without, say, needing to hit a database. But even here there is a spectrum.

The language the generator is in kinda matters. It affects speed. It affects installability on different local platforms. It affects your ability to write code to extend it and hack on it.

But perhaps more importantly, not all static site generators are only static site generators. Some can be run on the server as well, weirdly enough. And there are some that kinda look like static site generators, but are more correctly classified as flat-file CMSs.

Software	Lang	Notes
Jekyll	Ruby	One of the originals in this generation of static site generator.
Hugo	Go	Known for speed.
11ty	Node	Processes 11 different template languages out of the box.
Gatsby	React	Gatsby is truly a static site generator, but generally, the sites “hydrate” into SPAs, but remain static (nothing server-rendered). Big ecosystem of plugins to help with connecting data sources, handling images, etc.
Next		Next can do static site generation, but it can also run live in Node and do server-side rendering on the fly (“Isomorphic JavaScript”).
Nuxt	Vue	Nuxt is the spirtiual companion to Next but in Vue. It also can either be staticly generator or run isomorphicly.
Kirby	PHP	Kirby runs from static files (no database), but isn’t really a static site as the pages are rendered by PHP.
Statamic		Statamic is similar to Kirby in that static files are used for data but the page themselves are rendered by PHP.
Perch		Just an example of a CMS that keeps data in a database and isn’t trying to be a static site generator at all.

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