22 ms·

Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

276 points by ukyrgf 7y ago

ukyrgf 7y ago
This is extremely surprising, right? I clicked the headline thinking it was a shame some tech company chose the same name as a fairly popular static site generator. I guess when I see things like $50/mo for them to host a site, I just assume it's an extremely small team with a couple clients.
- ordinaryradical 7y ago
  I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital, but it suggests to me that 1) the security dilemmas of non-static but content driven sites are still big enough to warrant adoption of this methodology 2) potentially, there is something they are doing right in this space. I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing. What is the Gatsby sauce?
  - abhiyerra 7y ago
    I've been using Gatsby to develop some sites and I suppose the benefit is you can largely develop like you would a frontend app and deploy like a static site. It is actually quite nice to use though the GraphQL takes a while to get used to.
  - koboll 7y ago
    It bakes in things that make the experience better. SPA routing and high lighthouse scores are nice, but if they take a lot of work to accomplish, they might not be worth it for a small media site. If they're as easy as WordPress, however, then you're giving WordPress some real competition.
    - ordinaryradical 7y ago
      I hear this, but is this a differentiator when compared to the other static site generators? I was under the impression that Gatsby was just another interchangeable part of the so-called JAMstack...? Could you not get those wins using Pelican, or Hugo, or whatever?
  - lepouet 7y ago
    2 - I'm not a developer, i just did a few wordpress themes, while looking at a static site generators i gave a try to gatsby because of the way it use images and it was a joy, i learned some javascript, discovered react, used a lots of things for the first time and it was just a great experience, lots of tools, good documentation, it was just fun for me.
  - zokier 7y ago
    > I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing. What is the Gatsby sauce? I just browsed around their site wondering the same thing, the conclusion I reached was that their main value proposition is the integrations they provide together with the automation and deployment pipeline as a service. But I must also say it is pretty unclear what you are actually buying with the $50/mo subscription; what do you get compared to just running the software on your laptop?
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    > I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital Why? They charge $50/mo and maybe the recurring revenue checks out for preferential investors to feel comfortable with making a profit. If Gatsby can get their service included in a bunch of the domain name registration sites, pushing out Wordpress, then they get exponentially more customers! The real question is what they plan to do with the $15 million, followed by why the founders wanted to give up that much of the company as the revenue is probably fine. I don't think they actually are scaling majorly, except sales people. I think they are going to be subsidizing open source development, another developer day care shop that ideally will have the byproduct of making the tooling they use even more easy to use. Any insight?
    - clintonb 7y ago
      > If Gatsby can get their service included in a bunch of the domain name registration sites, pushing out Wordpress, then they get exponentially more customers! I don't follow this reasoning. The hosting sites that offer Wordpress, offer it because it is free. GatsbyJS is free. The service offered by Gatsby is not. Given the difference between $0 and $50/month, I don't see Wordpress going away anytime soon.
      - vidarh 7y ago
        How much of that $50/month do you think may be on offer to entice those hosting sites to try to upsell?
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success. I think the main value of Gatsby is the community-generated recipes to plug and play...but is there value here? If you have one very generic application, then maybe you save time upfront. But you are tied into this heavy wrapper around React that will probably cause you problems down the line. And you probably still need a backend. So I am not sure what value is being created? If you specifically need to generate lots of sites, or you have some performance requirement (and data that doesn't change often) then maybe. But I wouldn't use it to build anything complex (i.e. that would tie me into their product) because building an app isn't that much harder. I am sure there is a niche use but I think most people aren't doing anything complicated with it (I use it that way). I also don't really see how this could be a Wordpress killer (which is the intent of the fundraising presumably). Wordpress is totally end-to-end, it abstracts away all the right parts. This doesn't. $15m won't change that. In theory, I think applications like Prismic or Contentful (I think it is) actually break up these tasks better. From your app, you have a (usually) simple API. And it reflects the division of labour in most companies i.e. that code and content are separate (before anyone says it: they aren't offering a different product to Gatsby, if it seems that way then that is the point).
    - graphememes 7y ago
      It doesn't look like Gatsby itself is what is the main selling point, and I'd argue, the VC doesn't think Gatsby itself is either. Gatsby Preview / Gatsby Content Mesh is most likely the horse being bet on.
    - subpixel 7y ago
      > Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success. Automattic just raised $300 million dollars a week or so ago. One vision of success, I'm very sure, is getting acquired by Automattic.
- Vesuvium 7y ago
  It seems nowadays pretty much anything tech-related in a fancy wording and box, can get funding. Gatsby at least solves some real problems.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    We’ve been there before, and we know how that story ends.
- calcsam 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Gatsby has existed as an open-source project for >4 years, but we just launched our CMS Preview in open beta about 3 months ago -- lots more to come on that front!
shay_ker 7y ago
So, a Wordpress competitor? I'm curious to hear more.
- joshmn 7y ago
  No. More closely compared to Jekyll.
- calcsam 7y ago
  It's actually quite common to use Wordpress as a backend for a Gatsby site. So: build your UI in React with Gatsby, store your content with Wordpress. There's an out-of-the-box Wordpress/Gatsby integration, and we recently hired Jason Bahl, the creator of WPGraphQL, to make that integration even better!
dvcrn 7y ago
I thought this was about gatsby, the hair product company
- rhokstar 7y ago
  Their hair paste work really well. And Gatsby JS work really well, as well.
johncozen 7y ago
Kudos to the Gatsby.js team. Gatsby is developer experience nirvana, I really enjoy building with it.
- calcsam 7y ago
  Thanks! That's really great to hear!
muglug 7y ago
I wonder who the market for Gatsby is. I considered signing up for them for a somewhat simple markdown-powered blog, but ultimately ended up writing my own solution because I couldn’t justify the cost. The documentation for the self-hosted solution seems designed to put you off doing it yourself.
- andrewingram 7y ago
  My personal site is running Gatsby on Netlify, I haven't paid for anything except my domain. I'm not the biggest fan of Gatsby, but it's pretty decent for some projects.
- yoshyosh 7y ago
  very curious about this as well, given that price point and targeting the developer market
- pfraze 7y ago
  Web development agencies, for one
- pricci 7y ago
  I'm missing something from the picture I guess, but what service they offer for 50 bucks/month if you could host your static page built with Gatsby literaly anywhere for much less / free?
- robertoandred 7y ago
  What cost? Gatsby is free.
tylermenezes 7y ago
I have no idea how well the hosted service works, but Gatsby has been one of my favorite frameworks for a while, and I'm happy they're throwing some extra talent into making it awesome.
- calcsam 7y ago
  Thanks! We're really excited to be able to invest even more in open source. If there are particular features that would be helpful for you please open an issue on the repo!
justinmeiners 7y ago
> which promises that it allows these companies to do away with their old LAMP stack and move to a more modern stack, based on modern open-source tools and engineering practices. LAMP stack is open source...
- applecrazy 7y ago
  The implication in the sentence is that LAMP is an old open-source stack, whereas Gatsby is new open-source
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    Linux - Gatsby doesn't run on Linux? Apache - Gatsby doesn't run behind a load balancer (apache/nginx) with proxy_pass? MySql - Gatsby doesn't persist data into a database (MySql/Postgres)? PHP - I'll give you that PHP is out and node.js is in for backend development.
    - realityking 7y ago
      Linux - probably Apache/Nginx - some web server will be used, though much as likely something more lightweight than Apache. No proxy_pass needed since Gatsby just generates a bunch of files you need to serve MySQL - probably not unless married with a very complex backend PHP - yeah that’s out To understand Gatsby it’s crucial to understand that it’s using a significantly different architecture than traditional LAMP applications and monolithic CMSes
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Just about every production Gatsby instance is either using static data source (list of markdown/json files) or a monolithic CMS on the backend via API. It's more of a modern frontend site framework rather than a true self-contained app.
  - justinmeiners 7y ago
    Ah, that would make more sense.
nhooyr 7y ago
Does anyone know why Gatsby uses GraphQL? I don't understand how a static site benefits from GraphQL.
darepublic 7y ago
Gatsby is popular among frontend React devs although I kind of balk at end to end solutions like this. Nice alternatives to Gatsby are React-static and next.js
jpincheira 7y ago
I love Gatsby. We are about to release a new landing version of https://Standups.io https://Standups.io entirely with it. Blog and help center. We got rid of intercom guide :) Parse.ly also just released their new landing page all done with Gatsby.
calcsam 7y ago
Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!
- pfraze 7y ago
  You're getting questions about target market, and I'm pretty sure the answer is web development agencies, right? Any shop with a high volume of projects will need a development pipeline, stack, and ops story that is straight forward and fast to work with.
  - calcsam 7y ago
    Yep! Right now we're seeing a mix of customers that's roughly 1/3 web development agencies, 1/3 e-commerce websites, and 1/3 B2C lead generation websites. The value proposition of Gatsby to website agencies is working with modern tech & completing projects faster, and for e-commerce it's higher conversion rates which add $$ to the bottom line.
- dtap 7y ago
  Congrats Sam!
- ajdegol 7y ago
  Your pricing model doesn't offer any benefit for paying annually; in fact, given the time value of money, it is a disincentive. Being paid up front means you can deploy that cash to grow.
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  What needs to be done in Gatsby after so many years of intense development? Is it really so complicated to finish a program that generates HTML sites?
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  "Happy to answer any Qs!" And then he doesn't answer any.
bdcravens 7y ago
Gatsby is about 3 years old. I wonder how it would have worked out if in 2007 DHH and co had pivoted from Basecamp to Rails Inc and raised funding? Of course, to be fair, Meteor is still in business after taking the same path (though it seems most efforts are directed at Apollo?)
mmanfrin 7y ago
Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are you all doing it by hand? I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use to make a post on my gaming pc, for example, where I can add images easily (and have them resized properly). I feel like I should probably just set up a wordpress site, but wanted to know if I had other options.
- dstroot 7y ago
  You can use wordpress as your CM. Write posts and they appear in your Gatsby site. Contentful is probably a better option though... https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/
  - arnorhs 7y ago
    you can.. though, honestly, i'd advice against wordpress + gatsby. in my experience, because of various plugins required to do various things, the way media is fetched etc, and the highly difficult task of getting things working with schemas in wp. also, wordpress builds tend to also take the longest. if you enjoy hacking on wordpress and debugging weird issues, then this might be a good choice. It's much easier to build a blog using prismic, contentful, or even the netlify cms kind of is nice for a basic "serverless" blog/cms. honestly, i'd take markdown files in a bunch of folders any day over gatsby-source-wordpress.
- nihonde 7y ago
  I’ve got a site that requires non-technical people to post, and I’m looking into using Contentful or Netlify CMS as their content editing UI, which in turn triggers a build and deploy. (I use Middleman but Gatsby should be able to do the same.)
  - arnorhs 7y ago
    take a look at prismic as well.. it has some nice features for "normies" .. although it is missing a bunch of nice features from contentful.
iamwil 7y ago
calcsam: How do you think about defensibility? One might think that because the underlying tech is open source, someone else can also spring up a hosting service. Is that not an issue because agencies would want the official hosting for the open source project because they want the reassurance? Or is it for another reason this isn't an issue?
- calcsam 7y ago
  Interestingly, a lot of open-source companies have built defensible businesses -- a list is over at http://oss.cash http://oss.cash. Recent IPOs include Mulesoft, Elastic, Mongo, Fastly... More specifically to Gatsby, we don't actually see ourselves in the hosting business, more in the "collaboration" business -- most websites have teams of nontechnical folks that are reviewing sites before they go live, creating and editing content, and so on. We're building Gatsby-specific collaboration tooling, starting with CMS Preview. A good comparison here would be Github -- nobody thinks of Github as "Git hosting", they think of Github as the place where developers collaborate together on projects.
nickpinkston 7y ago
Congrats guys!
ben_jones 7y ago
The real play must be to take a chunk out of medium right? “Companies that don’t like medium or Wordpress are rolling their own costly solutions, so here we are with the smooth transition”. The problem is if they want to be profitable they will eventually have to incorporate the bad parts of medium and/or the bad parts of Wordpress and then we’re back to square one with some new minimal open source static site builder. This wheel is exhausting.
mattkevan 7y ago
Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered. React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it. For me, the fun of static sites - after years of building sites with CMSs like Wordpress and Drupal - is that they’re as close as possible to plain HTML, lightning-fast and very simple.
- nine_k 7y ago
  If Gatsby did not feel different and not offered what Jekyll / Hugo / Zola offer, what would be the point? If existing solutions are near perfect for you, you are not the target audience.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    What itch is Gatsby scratching?
    - dunerat 7y ago
      I'm one of the use cases that Sam mentions - B2C website. Replatforming our site with Gatsby, Netlify (hosting and more) and Contentful (headless CMS) has saved us hundreds of dollars a month in hosting - our site which receives 20,000 - 30,000 visitors a month now costs $0 to host. Additionally it is radically faster and more secure than it previously was. Being able to use React as needed has enabled us to manage some relatively complicated form handling/routing, get really creative around how we handle 'sites within the site' for a large sales team that we support, and easily create calculators and other tools for our customers. And bonus - I'm a graphic designer by trade. For one reason or another a web team of 7+ people left my company over the course of 6months and I stepped in to fill the void. Just me, one person who had prior experience building the odd site (maybe one a year) with HTML, CSS. I literally learned javascript and React through Gatsby (I'd say I'm junior developer level at this point - which is actually a good fit for my company). Gatsby is a great product (for many use cases), run by a generous team, surrounded by an equally generous community. I owe my career to Gatsby. My company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year thanks to Gatsby. Stoked to see Gatsby's continued growth and success.
p45please 7y ago
Congrats to Kyle and the team. Been using Gatsby in prod for nearly a year now (v1 then migrated to v2), the team is super helpful and responsive to feedback and issues. (DTC e-commerce)
miguelmota 7y ago
Gatsby is great; we use it for all our marketing sites because it doesn't hide content behind JavaScript like plain React so it's better for SEO. Gatsby would be great to compete with Netlify for static React app hosting.
- hkai 7y ago
  Don't search engine crawlers render React properly?
  - csande17 7y ago
    Google kinda sorta sometimes executes JavaScript on pages it crawls, but much less frequently and less reliably than regular HTML indexing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
GoodGOYIM 7y ago
I don't understand the hype around Gatsby and co. Here in France everyone uses wordpress/drupal + docker and boom. This combo works great and there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
nwmcsween 7y ago
So alternatively why not a less coupled system? Hasura + hyperapp, etc + ...?
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  Doesn't generate static pages.
  - nwmcsween 7y ago
    Sarcasm? If not there is nothing stopping you from generating static files using build time queries.
    - fiatjaf 7y ago
      Are you serious? Then why are you suggesting libraries? Or even languages? There's nothing stopping you from generating static files using machine instructions directly.
fareesh 7y ago
What's a good, mature headless CMS that "just works" and is compatible with Gatsby/GraphQL?
- gpxl 7y ago
  Contentful
  - iliketocomplain 7y ago
    I don't get it: Afaik contentful is a company offering a paid for CMS API, but it isn't a piece of software I can run? But I must be wrong, I people wouldn't recommend this again and again when asked for a CMS. I'd love to try it, where can I find it? Wasn't able to find it on github, npm, Google.
csande17 7y ago
I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework and build pipeline that requires organizations invest a lot of resources into switching. (Gatsby gets most of this for free by building on top of the Cool Kid Stack's nine-thousand-package NPM lasagna.) 3. Sell their captive audience expensive solutions to problems they wouldn't have with other frameworks. (See e.g. another commentor's discussion of incremental builds.) This strategy might not contribute much to society, but neither do a lot of other startups--what matters to investors is that it'll probably make them a lot of money, assuming they execute it correctly.
- lsalvatore 7y ago
  Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?
  - dplgk 7y ago
    Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.
    - fastball 7y ago
      You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
    - wp381640 7y ago
      > I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally
spotlmnop 7y ago
Congratulations, now build some great things with that funding .
morcutt 7y ago
I've enjoyed using Gatsby in a hybrid approach to combine marketing and a web app for MVPs. It's allowed me to get up and running quickly and haven't run into any major issues so far.
tyingq 7y ago
A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store and then extracts bits out to render a page? It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea. I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.
- mister_hn 7y ago
  I still prefer Hugo 1000x over this, especially because I don't have to deal with npm
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  That's what the lemmings said before they jumped the cliff ;-)
- azangru 7y ago
  Let me offer a real-world example. We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's and author's page. It was almost like describing a simple relational database. Except we wanted the site to be static, and the data about books and authors to be stored in yaml files on github. So book page, author page and index page needed to learn about each other at build time by reading the frontmatter of the yaml files. With Gatsby's graphql data layer doing so would be trivial, and the whole developer experience would have been highly satisfying. But we weren't allowed to use Gatsby, because the size of the main javascript file that Gatsby (coupled with Netlify CMS) would output was approximately 100 kB, and our tech lead had a strong aversion to large javascript files and to what he considered an overengineered framework. So we had to use Hugo instead. Which we did. Hugo, bless it, also allowed building relationships between data files at build time; but the way it did so was so unintuitive and its Go-based templating language was so cumbersome that I hated almost every moment of working with Hugo. Besides, barebones Hugo did not have a flexible enough static assets pipeline, so we had to write our own (gulp) scripts for bundling static assets. With Gatsby, that would have come out of the box. Gatsby may not be the technology for building lightest-weight sites (no matter how much the Gatsby team emphasises their commitment to performance), but the developer experience when working with Gatsby is unsurpassable.
langitbiru 7y ago
The history of Gatsby is interesting. If my memory serves me well, it was started as an open source project. Then the developers of this open source project got funded by VC. So the pattern is like this: open source project -> get funded by VC. The other similar case is IPFS (open source project) -> Filecoin (get funded by VC). Anyway, congratulation to the Gatsby team! :)
bb88 7y ago
If history is any judge, four years from now, it will no longer be modern. And those people who have spent time and money investing into gatsby will be looking to leave for something else. It's one of my biggest issues with software is that software is never done. It's always being torn down and replaced with something else.
greggman2 7y ago
Reading through the comments I get the impression there is a mis-understanding of what gatsby is. It might be my misunderstanding but ... "Static Site generator" seems to be the confusion. If I'm reading correctly gatsby is more a replacement for webpack than for jekyll or ghost. You use it as scaffolding to help build your front end. The docs show it compiling react, jsx, using various plugins like emotion etc. It all looks like it's supposed to be a better webpack. Am I wrong?
- woutr_be 7y ago
  I think you might be wrong in your understanding. Webpack is a bundler, which Gatsby uses. You can use Gatsby as a replacement for Jekyll or Ghost, they do the same thing, i.e. output static HTML. However Gatsby uses React and GraphQL to achieve that result. While Jekyll uses markdown files for example.
- lhorie 7y ago
  I think "static site generator" is a more apt description than "webpack replacement". The React code in Gatsby is SSR'ed only (in production mode, anyways) making writing idiomatic dynamic client-side React code very awkward. Also, Gatsby uses Webpack[1] and it doesn't expose compilation options in any meaningful way like webpack itself does (and it doesn't have a plug-and-play philosophy like Parcel either). I'm not a huge fan of webpack config API personally, but I certainly would never consider using Gatsby as an alternative generic purpose bundler! [1] https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2a404eec9705a5a493602/packages/gatsby/package.json#L135-L140 https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2...
c0ffe 7y ago
I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend with complexity beyond static-scrollable content. Some problems that I found after some months of integrating it with an existing CMS: * Development complexity: depending if Gatsby is run on development or production mode, React's `render` methods are called in the browser or inside NodeJS. Having this code executed in a Node process is expected because Gatsby is a static site generator, but this big split between the environment of development and production builds, paired with a growing codebase that keeps evolving, catches new developers on our team with multiple and surprising bugs. * Debug complexity: JSX code is hard to debug, because the code that is really executed is generated at runtime, so it is not possible for example, to put a breakpoint in a JSX file from your text editor and start a build with Node running in debug mode. * Runtime requirements: as far as I remember, executing `gatsby build` on my development machine uses ~3.4 GiB of private RAM for the main node process, and it takes around 5 minutes if the local cache is cleared (it ends in around a minute with cache). Its important to remember this when choosing in which server the build runs. * Integration: Gatsby does not provide out of the box integration with CMS for content authoring (like for example, page drafts). Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React), but I would wait a few more years until it becomes more mature to use it again for any future project.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React) Out of interest, what's good about building static websites with React?
  - gherkinnn 7y ago
    I prefer React over any other templating lang I’ve used so far. Though I never liked Gatsby.
  - azangru 7y ago
    > what's good about building static websites with React As compared to which alternatives? Personally, I find the splitting up of code into components, together with the power and expressiveness of jsx and its closeness to plain javascript, and the simplicity of updating the ui in response to changes of state to be a very compelling argument for react.
arcturus17 7y ago
I’ve been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I’ve considered using it in prod in an eCommerce site. Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it’s not even integrated yet with my CMS of choice. How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can’t find a way to justify this to my clients...
- arcturus17 7y ago
  Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings... You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in prod... Again, these are all solved problems in just about every other eCommerce framework! If you look at some of the Gatsby eCommerce prod examples you will see a few gorgeous sites (the Flamingo one for example) but they all have very few product references and features (no user accounts, etc) All this is to say the possible use cases for Gatsby in eCommerce seem very narrow, though I would love to be proven wrong.
  - joking 7y ago
    I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do? redeploy the site on every purchase? Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby.
    - arcturus17 7y ago
      Yea, essentially what I'm saying in my a vs b scenario. > Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby. And you still haven't solved the issue of delays between content changes and deployment... What if someone has made a bad mistake in content editing and you need to revert it? You're exposed to the whims of your build processes and infrastructure... There's no way I can sell to anyone who's played with Wordpress or Shopify "well, your changes might take anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to be live..." That's why I'm asking, how can product and engineering teams justify this kind of thing? I'm not being facetious, I'd love to hear their perspective.
lloydatkinson 7y ago
I recommend people checkout Gridsome. It’s a similar product but for Vue.
bbx 7y ago
I really love Gatsby. It combines the best of both worlds: static sites and React. For a very long time, I've been fond of Jekyll. It's mostly because my open source projects are hosted on GitHub and Jekyll is their go-to framework. There's nothing wrong per se with Jekyll. I was simply missing some features from React. When I was working on React apps, the main benefits for me were: (i) component encapsulation and (ii) CSS Modules. It's easy to understand what a component does just by looking at it. If it gets too complicated, you can simply split it into another component. And CSS Modules are a life saver. The two hardest things in CSS are floats and naming things. That second part is solved now. My issue with React however is the whole Webpack setup, and the fact that JS is required to run the website. So when Gatsby appeared, I was pleasantly surprised to see it solved these issues. I ended up rebuilding my website with Gatsby, and I'm currently using it for 2 client projects. My only issue with Gatsby is its reliance on GraphQL. I tried understanding the GraphQL concepts and purpose, especially with its weird syntax, but it feels over-engineered. Or at least, it doesn't feel like Gatsby needs GraphQL. So I'm not sure why it's so tightly tied to it. What I end up doing for fetching/storing data is using some static JSON files. It's easy to read, to port, and to parse. I only use GatsbyJS.org the open source project, not GatsbyJS.com the service. But it seems to be similar to WordPress.org/WordPress.com, or what Ghost does. Even if the open source project somehow died, I wouldn't feel stuck with the framework ; since most of the codebase are React components, it'd be easy to port to another platform. That's another benefit.
- sings 7y ago
  Honest question, but why is React unique in offering component encapsulation? I see this more of a structural paradigm than something a framework allows for or limits against.
  - bbx 7y ago
    It’s probably not unique in that aspect. I just happen to have quite a bit of experience in React. And that “componentization” only made sense to me when I started using React.
  - tashoecraft 7y ago
merqurio 7y ago
I evaluated Gatsby, among other solutions, for our company's website. We use React in production for a large application, nothing new there, but for a static site, I thought it had an overly-complicated build pipeline. In the end, we went with Hugo[1], never regretted, huge fan of static site generators and Netlify CMS[2]. About raising that series A, I hope they have a bigger plan in mind than hosting sites or yet another CMS. If the vision is the "reinvent" the way we work on static sites, I respect that, but I don't see a business case there. [1]: https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io [2]: https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/
satvikpendem 7y ago
For those who like React static sites but dislike the complexity of Gatsby and GraphQL, check out react-static. https://github.com/react-static/react-static https://github.com/react-static/react-static YouTube example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ
bartq 7y ago
I don't really know what Gatsby is good at because I've never been target customer of it. But judging on website and docs I think its power lies in simplicity: people want to get shit together and call a day. This tool allows that. It probably won't live long, but that's not a problem, right? Most websites built with it are short lived: promotion www, sales, register forms etc.
chrshawkes 7y ago
I have tutorials on Gatsby and have used it quite a bit. I don't recommend it. I can't understand why this is getting funding? People are so much better off with a CMS like Django or Wordpress. Hell, they could use static HTML, Apache and Quill.JS and nothing else is needed. Maybe sub Quill with TinyMCE or CKEditor. There is nothing overly special about Gatsby.
wiradikusuma 7y ago
I checked their website and I still don't get what it actually is. I'm familiar with Hugo (compiles .md files to static site), Forestry (CMS for Hugo and other static site generators) and Netlify (to deploy that static site). Where does it sit, and how is it different?
fiatjaf 7y ago
In a dozen of hours I wrote Sitio[1]. Sitio generates static pages with React templates and if wanted they also become alive React components at the client. It has a simple imperative API, no GraphQL, no Webpack, any kind of datasource can be easily plugged (in fact I did plug many). It turns out Gatsby also exposes an imperative API that runs behind its fancy declarative API, and it's very similar to mine. However, I wrote mine in 12 hours. Gatsby has a big team and millions of dollars and it's been in the works for many many years. And still some weeks ago I tried to use Gatsby to generate a site with data from Trello and Instagram and couldn't, hit some bugs, but mainly hit an opaque and very complex API. Why? [1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio
- dplgk 7y ago
  No webpack is a big win. Thinking Gatsby is this fun & easy thing and then realizing you're going all-in on the current npm/JS insanity is not a good feature.
  - fiatjaf 7y ago
    I have this great badge at the repository: [Webpack free] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f64349fa4fe7c11b/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f62616467652f7765627061636b2d667265652d6f72616e67652e737667 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f...
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  Worse: all the datasources were provided by plugins written by third-party indie developers working for free (and for that reason they weren't perfect, of course). What is the core team wasting their time on?
vicbun 7y ago
And we at https://simulify.com https://simulify.com are making a UI for react based static sites. Pls join our alpha.
EGreg 7y ago
“Matthews says Gatsby (the company) is now contributing about $3 million per year to open-source projects that include the core Gatsby tools and the plugin ecosystem around it.” Who should we reach out to about this funding for our open source project to integrate with Gatsby ecosystem? We have an open-source platform with tons of components like videoconferencing, events, rides etc. hosted for free on github.com .

276 points by ukyrgf 7y ago

This is extremely surprising, right? I clicked the headline thinking it was a shame some tech company chose the same name as a fairly popular static site generator. I guess when I see things like $50/mo for them to host a site, I just assume it's an extremely small team with a couple clients.

ordinaryradical 7y ago
I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital, but it suggests to me that 1) the security dilemmas of non-static but content driven sites are still big enough to warrant adoption of this methodology 2) potentially, there is something they are doing right in this space. I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing. What is the Gatsby sauce?
- abhiyerra 7y ago
  I've been using Gatsby to develop some sites and I suppose the benefit is you can largely develop like you would a frontend app and deploy like a static site. It is actually quite nice to use though the GraphQL takes a while to get used to.
- koboll 7y ago
  It bakes in things that make the experience better. SPA routing and high lighthouse scores are nice, but if they take a lot of work to accomplish, they might not be worth it for a small media site. If they're as easy as WordPress, however, then you're giving WordPress some real competition.
  - ordinaryradical 7y ago
    I hear this, but is this a differentiator when compared to the other static site generators? I was under the impression that Gatsby was just another interchangeable part of the so-called JAMstack...? Could you not get those wins using Pelican, or Hugo, or whatever?
- lepouet 7y ago
  2 - I'm not a developer, i just did a few wordpress themes, while looking at a static site generators i gave a try to gatsby because of the way it use images and it was a joy, i learned some javascript, discovered react, used a lots of things for the first time and it was just a great experience, lots of tools, good documentation, it was just fun for me.
- zokier 7y ago
  > I'd really like to know what 2 is as there's a lot of other options in this space that are also free, open source, and seem to accomplish the same thing. What is the Gatsby sauce? I just browsed around their site wondering the same thing, the conclusion I reached was that their main value proposition is the integrations they provide together with the automation and deployment pipeline as a service. But I must also say it is pretty unclear what you are actually buying with the $50/mo subscription; what do you get compared to just running the software on your laptop?
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > I'm very surprised that a static site generator can raise this much capital Why? They charge $50/mo and maybe the recurring revenue checks out for preferential investors to feel comfortable with making a profit. If Gatsby can get their service included in a bunch of the domain name registration sites, pushing out Wordpress, then they get exponentially more customers! The real question is what they plan to do with the $15 million, followed by why the founders wanted to give up that much of the company as the revenue is probably fine. I don't think they actually are scaling majorly, except sales people. I think they are going to be subsidizing open source development, another developer day care shop that ideally will have the byproduct of making the tooling they use even more easy to use. Any insight?
  - clintonb 7y ago
    > If Gatsby can get their service included in a bunch of the domain name registration sites, pushing out Wordpress, then they get exponentially more customers! I don't follow this reasoning. The hosting sites that offer Wordpress, offer it because it is free. GatsbyJS is free. The service offered by Gatsby is not. Given the difference between $0 and $50/month, I don't see Wordpress going away anytime soon.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      How much of that $50/month do you think may be on offer to entice those hosting sites to try to upsell?
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success. I think the main value of Gatsby is the community-generated recipes to plug and play...but is there value here? If you have one very generic application, then maybe you save time upfront. But you are tied into this heavy wrapper around React that will probably cause you problems down the line. And you probably still need a backend. So I am not sure what value is being created? If you specifically need to generate lots of sites, or you have some performance requirement (and data that doesn't change often) then maybe. But I wouldn't use it to build anything complex (i.e. that would tie me into their product) because building an app isn't that much harder. I am sure there is a niche use but I think most people aren't doing anything complicated with it (I use it that way). I also don't really see how this could be a Wordpress killer (which is the intent of the fundraising presumably). Wordpress is totally end-to-end, it abstracts away all the right parts. This doesn't. $15m won't change that. In theory, I think applications like Prismic or Contentful (I think it is) actually break up these tasks better. From your app, you have a (usually) simple API. And it reflects the division of labour in most companies i.e. that code and content are separate (before anyone says it: they aren't offering a different product to Gatsby, if it seems that way then that is the point).
  - graphememes 7y ago
    It doesn't look like Gatsby itself is what is the main selling point, and I'd argue, the VC doesn't think Gatsby itself is either. Gatsby Preview / Gatsby Content Mesh is most likely the horse being bet on.
  - subpixel 7y ago
    > Raising capital isn't success. Profitability is success. Automattic just raised $300 million dollars a week or so ago. One vision of success, I'm very sure, is getting acquired by Automattic.
Vesuvium 7y ago
It seems nowadays pretty much anything tech-related in a fancy wording and box, can get funding. Gatsby at least solves some real problems.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  We’ve been there before, and we know how that story ends.
calcsam 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Gatsby has existed as an open-source project for >4 years, but we just launched our CMS Preview in open beta about 3 months ago -- lots more to come on that front!

shay_ker 7y ago

So, a Wordpress competitor? I'm curious to hear more.

joshmn 7y ago
No. More closely compared to Jekyll.
calcsam 7y ago
It's actually quite common to use Wordpress as a backend for a Gatsby site. So: build your UI in React with Gatsby, store your content with Wordpress. There's an out-of-the-box Wordpress/Gatsby integration, and we recently hired Jason Bahl, the creator of WPGraphQL, to make that integration even better!

dvcrn 7y ago

I thought this was about gatsby, the hair product company

rhokstar 7y ago
Their hair paste work really well. And Gatsby JS work really well, as well.

johncozen 7y ago

Kudos to the Gatsby.js team. Gatsby is developer experience nirvana, I really enjoy building with it.

calcsam 7y ago
Thanks! That's really great to hear!

muglug 7y ago

I wonder who the market for Gatsby is. I considered signing up for them for a somewhat simple markdown-powered blog, but ultimately ended up writing my own solution because I couldn’t justify the cost. The documentation for the self-hosted solution seems designed to put you off doing it yourself.

andrewingram 7y ago
My personal site is running Gatsby on Netlify, I haven't paid for anything except my domain. I'm not the biggest fan of Gatsby, but it's pretty decent for some projects.
yoshyosh 7y ago
very curious about this as well, given that price point and targeting the developer market
pfraze 7y ago
Web development agencies, for one
pricci 7y ago
I'm missing something from the picture I guess, but what service they offer for 50 bucks/month if you could host your static page built with Gatsby literaly anywhere for much less / free?
robertoandred 7y ago
What cost? Gatsby is free.

tylermenezes 7y ago

I have no idea how well the hosted service works, but Gatsby has been one of my favorite frameworks for a while, and I'm happy they're throwing some extra talent into making it awesome.

calcsam 7y ago
Thanks! We're really excited to be able to invest even more in open source. If there are particular features that would be helpful for you please open an issue on the repo!

justinmeiners 7y ago

> which promises that it allows these companies to do away with their old LAMP stack and move to a more modern stack, based on modern open-source tools and engineering practices. LAMP stack is open source...

applecrazy 7y ago
The implication in the sentence is that LAMP is an old open-source stack, whereas Gatsby is new open-source
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Linux - Gatsby doesn't run on Linux? Apache - Gatsby doesn't run behind a load balancer (apache/nginx) with proxy_pass? MySql - Gatsby doesn't persist data into a database (MySql/Postgres)? PHP - I'll give you that PHP is out and node.js is in for backend development.
  - realityking 7y ago
    Linux - probably Apache/Nginx - some web server will be used, though much as likely something more lightweight than Apache. No proxy_pass needed since Gatsby just generates a bunch of files you need to serve MySQL - probably not unless married with a very complex backend PHP - yeah that’s out To understand Gatsby it’s crucial to understand that it’s using a significantly different architecture than traditional LAMP applications and monolithic CMSes
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Just about every production Gatsby instance is either using static data source (list of markdown/json files) or a monolithic CMS on the backend via API. It's more of a modern frontend site framework rather than a true self-contained app.
- justinmeiners 7y ago
  Ah, that would make more sense.

nhooyr 7y ago

Does anyone know why Gatsby uses GraphQL? I don't understand how a static site benefits from GraphQL.

darepublic 7y ago

Gatsby is popular among frontend React devs although I kind of balk at end to end solutions like this. Nice alternatives to Gatsby are React-static and next.js

jpincheira 7y ago

I love Gatsby. We are about to release a new landing version of https://Standups.io https://Standups.io entirely with it. Blog and help center. We got rid of intercom guide :) Parse.ly also just released their new landing page all done with Gatsby.

calcsam 7y ago

Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!

pfraze 7y ago
You're getting questions about target market, and I'm pretty sure the answer is web development agencies, right? Any shop with a high volume of projects will need a development pipeline, stack, and ops story that is straight forward and fast to work with.
- calcsam 7y ago
  Yep! Right now we're seeing a mix of customers that's roughly 1/3 web development agencies, 1/3 e-commerce websites, and 1/3 B2C lead generation websites. The value proposition of Gatsby to website agencies is working with modern tech & completing projects faster, and for e-commerce it's higher conversion rates which add $$ to the bottom line.
dtap 7y ago
Congrats Sam!
ajdegol 7y ago
Your pricing model doesn't offer any benefit for paying annually; in fact, given the time value of money, it is a disincentive. Being paid up front means you can deploy that cash to grow.
fiatjaf 7y ago
What needs to be done in Gatsby after so many years of intense development? Is it really so complicated to finish a program that generates HTML sites?
fiatjaf 7y ago
"Happy to answer any Qs!" And then he doesn't answer any.

bdcravens 7y ago

Gatsby is about 3 years old. I wonder how it would have worked out if in 2007 DHH and co had pivoted from Basecamp to Rails Inc and raised funding? Of course, to be fair, Meteor is still in business after taking the same path (though it seems most efforts are directed at Apollo?)

mmanfrin 7y ago

Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are you all doing it by hand? I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use to make a post on my gaming pc, for example, where I can add images easily (and have them resized properly). I feel like I should probably just set up a wordpress site, but wanted to know if I had other options.

dstroot 7y ago
You can use wordpress as your CM. Write posts and they appear in your Gatsby site. Contentful is probably a better option though... https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/
- arnorhs 7y ago
  you can.. though, honestly, i'd advice against wordpress + gatsby. in my experience, because of various plugins required to do various things, the way media is fetched etc, and the highly difficult task of getting things working with schemas in wp. also, wordpress builds tend to also take the longest. if you enjoy hacking on wordpress and debugging weird issues, then this might be a good choice. It's much easier to build a blog using prismic, contentful, or even the netlify cms kind of is nice for a basic "serverless" blog/cms. honestly, i'd take markdown files in a bunch of folders any day over gatsby-source-wordpress.
nihonde 7y ago
I’ve got a site that requires non-technical people to post, and I’m looking into using Contentful or Netlify CMS as their content editing UI, which in turn triggers a build and deploy. (I use Middleman but Gatsby should be able to do the same.)
- arnorhs 7y ago
  take a look at prismic as well.. it has some nice features for "normies" .. although it is missing a bunch of nice features from contentful.

iamwil 7y ago

calcsam: How do you think about defensibility? One might think that because the underlying tech is open source, someone else can also spring up a hosting service. Is that not an issue because agencies would want the official hosting for the open source project because they want the reassurance? Or is it for another reason this isn't an issue?

calcsam 7y ago
Interestingly, a lot of open-source companies have built defensible businesses -- a list is over at http://oss.cash http://oss.cash. Recent IPOs include Mulesoft, Elastic, Mongo, Fastly... More specifically to Gatsby, we don't actually see ourselves in the hosting business, more in the "collaboration" business -- most websites have teams of nontechnical folks that are reviewing sites before they go live, creating and editing content, and so on. We're building Gatsby-specific collaboration tooling, starting with CMS Preview. A good comparison here would be Github -- nobody thinks of Github as "Git hosting", they think of Github as the place where developers collaborate together on projects.

nickpinkston 7y ago

Congrats guys!

ben_jones 7y ago

The real play must be to take a chunk out of medium right? “Companies that don’t like medium or Wordpress are rolling their own costly solutions, so here we are with the smooth transition”. The problem is if they want to be profitable they will eventually have to incorporate the bad parts of medium and/or the bad parts of Wordpress and then we’re back to square one with some new minimal open source static site builder. This wheel is exhausting.

mattkevan 7y ago

Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered. React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it. For me, the fun of static sites - after years of building sites with CMSs like Wordpress and Drupal - is that they’re as close as possible to plain HTML, lightning-fast and very simple.

nine_k 7y ago
If Gatsby did not feel different and not offered what Jekyll / Hugo / Zola offer, what would be the point? If existing solutions are near perfect for you, you are not the target audience.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  What itch is Gatsby scratching?
  - dunerat 7y ago
    I'm one of the use cases that Sam mentions - B2C website. Replatforming our site with Gatsby, Netlify (hosting and more) and Contentful (headless CMS) has saved us hundreds of dollars a month in hosting - our site which receives 20,000 - 30,000 visitors a month now costs $0 to host. Additionally it is radically faster and more secure than it previously was. Being able to use React as needed has enabled us to manage some relatively complicated form handling/routing, get really creative around how we handle 'sites within the site' for a large sales team that we support, and easily create calculators and other tools for our customers. And bonus - I'm a graphic designer by trade. For one reason or another a web team of 7+ people left my company over the course of 6months and I stepped in to fill the void. Just me, one person who had prior experience building the odd site (maybe one a year) with HTML, CSS. I literally learned javascript and React through Gatsby (I'd say I'm junior developer level at this point - which is actually a good fit for my company). Gatsby is a great product (for many use cases), run by a generous team, surrounded by an equally generous community. I owe my career to Gatsby. My company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year thanks to Gatsby. Stoked to see Gatsby's continued growth and success.

p45please 7y ago

Congrats to Kyle and the team. Been using Gatsby in prod for nearly a year now (v1 then migrated to v2), the team is super helpful and responsive to feedback and issues. (DTC e-commerce)

miguelmota 7y ago

Gatsby is great; we use it for all our marketing sites because it doesn't hide content behind JavaScript like plain React so it's better for SEO. Gatsby would be great to compete with Netlify for static React app hosting.

hkai 7y ago
Don't search engine crawlers render React properly?
- csande17 7y ago
  Google kinda sorta sometimes executes JavaScript on pages it crawls, but much less frequently and less reliably than regular HTML indexing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

GoodGOYIM 7y ago

I don't understand the hype around Gatsby and co. Here in France everyone uses wordpress/drupal + docker and boom. This combo works great and there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

nwmcsween 7y ago

So alternatively why not a less coupled system? Hasura + hyperapp, etc + ...?

fiatjaf 7y ago
Doesn't generate static pages.
- nwmcsween 7y ago
  Sarcasm? If not there is nothing stopping you from generating static files using build time queries.
  - fiatjaf 7y ago
    Are you serious? Then why are you suggesting libraries? Or even languages? There's nothing stopping you from generating static files using machine instructions directly.

fareesh 7y ago

What's a good, mature headless CMS that "just works" and is compatible with Gatsby/GraphQL?

gpxl 7y ago
Contentful
- iliketocomplain 7y ago
  I don't get it: Afaik contentful is a company offering a paid for CMS API, but it isn't a piece of software I can run? But I must be wrong, I people wouldn't recommend this again and again when asked for a CMS. I'd love to try it, where can I find it? Wasn't able to find it on github, npm, Google.

csande17 7y ago

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework and build pipeline that requires organizations invest a lot of resources into switching. (Gatsby gets most of this for free by building on top of the Cool Kid Stack's nine-thousand-package NPM lasagna.) 3. Sell their captive audience expensive solutions to problems they wouldn't have with other frameworks. (See e.g. another commentor's discussion of incremental builds.) This strategy might not contribute much to society, but neither do a lot of other startups--what matters to investors is that it'll probably make them a lot of money, assuming they execute it correctly.

lsalvatore 7y ago
Did you mean "overly-complicated" as in for people who don't work in the industry and just speculate on trends?
- dplgk 7y ago
  Well, it's not really targeted at actual developers.
  - fastball 7y ago
    You need to know JS to use Gatsby, so... seems like development to me?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - wp381640 7y ago
    > I wrote one once, and it was a couple hundred lines of code. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain edit: rather than cheapshot with a throwaway comment i'll expand on this - from my experience what Gatsby provides is an open source pluggable info processing pipeline. I'm really interested in seeing it develop as a replacement for some of the larger and much more expensive and proprietary internal knowledge and content management systems which provide a ton of plugins to tap into resevoirs and allow you to process/publish internally

spotlmnop 7y ago

Congratulations, now build some great things with that funding .

morcutt 7y ago

I've enjoyed using Gatsby in a hybrid approach to combine marketing and a web app for MVPs. It's allowed me to get up and running quickly and haven't run into any major issues so far.

tyingq 7y ago

A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store and then extracts bits out to render a page? It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea. I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.

mister_hn 7y ago
I still prefer Hugo 1000x over this, especially because I don't have to deal with npm
VvR-Ox 7y ago
That's what the lemmings said before they jumped the cliff ;-)
azangru 7y ago
Let me offer a real-world example. We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's and author's page. It was almost like describing a simple relational database. Except we wanted the site to be static, and the data about books and authors to be stored in yaml files on github. So book page, author page and index page needed to learn about each other at build time by reading the frontmatter of the yaml files. With Gatsby's graphql data layer doing so would be trivial, and the whole developer experience would have been highly satisfying. But we weren't allowed to use Gatsby, because the size of the main javascript file that Gatsby (coupled with Netlify CMS) would output was approximately 100 kB, and our tech lead had a strong aversion to large javascript files and to what he considered an overengineered framework. So we had to use Hugo instead. Which we did. Hugo, bless it, also allowed building relationships between data files at build time; but the way it did so was so unintuitive and its Go-based templating language was so cumbersome that I hated almost every moment of working with Hugo. Besides, barebones Hugo did not have a flexible enough static assets pipeline, so we had to write our own (gulp) scripts for bundling static assets. With Gatsby, that would have come out of the box. Gatsby may not be the technology for building lightest-weight sites (no matter how much the Gatsby team emphasises their commitment to performance), but the developer experience when working with Gatsby is unsurpassable.

langitbiru 7y ago

The history of Gatsby is interesting. If my memory serves me well, it was started as an open source project. Then the developers of this open source project got funded by VC. So the pattern is like this: open source project -> get funded by VC. The other similar case is IPFS (open source project) -> Filecoin (get funded by VC). Anyway, congratulation to the Gatsby team! :)

bb88 7y ago

If history is any judge, four years from now, it will no longer be modern. And those people who have spent time and money investing into gatsby will be looking to leave for something else. It's one of my biggest issues with software is that software is never done. It's always being torn down and replaced with something else.

greggman2 7y ago

Reading through the comments I get the impression there is a mis-understanding of what gatsby is. It might be my misunderstanding but ... "Static Site generator" seems to be the confusion. If I'm reading correctly gatsby is more a replacement for webpack than for jekyll or ghost. You use it as scaffolding to help build your front end. The docs show it compiling react, jsx, using various plugins like emotion etc. It all looks like it's supposed to be a better webpack. Am I wrong?

woutr_be 7y ago
I think you might be wrong in your understanding. Webpack is a bundler, which Gatsby uses. You can use Gatsby as a replacement for Jekyll or Ghost, they do the same thing, i.e. output static HTML. However Gatsby uses React and GraphQL to achieve that result. While Jekyll uses markdown files for example.
lhorie 7y ago
I think "static site generator" is a more apt description than "webpack replacement". The React code in Gatsby is SSR'ed only (in production mode, anyways) making writing idiomatic dynamic client-side React code very awkward. Also, Gatsby uses Webpack[1] and it doesn't expose compilation options in any meaningful way like webpack itself does (and it doesn't have a plug-and-play philosophy like Parcel either). I'm not a huge fan of webpack config API personally, but I certainly would never consider using Gatsby as an alternative generic purpose bundler! [1] https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2a404eec9705a5a493602/packages/gatsby/package.json#L135-L140 https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/561d33e2e491d3971cb2...

c0ffe 7y ago

I would not recommend to use Gatsby in a project if it requires a frontend with complexity beyond static-scrollable content. Some problems that I found after some months of integrating it with an existing CMS: * Development complexity: depending if Gatsby is run on development or production mode, React's `render` methods are called in the browser or inside NodeJS. Having this code executed in a Node process is expected because Gatsby is a static site generator, but this big split between the environment of development and production builds, paired with a growing codebase that keeps evolving, catches new developers on our team with multiple and surprising bugs. * Debug complexity: JSX code is hard to debug, because the code that is really executed is generated at runtime, so it is not possible for example, to put a breakpoint in a JSX file from your text editor and start a build with Node running in debug mode. * Runtime requirements: as far as I remember, executing `gatsby build` on my development machine uses ~3.4 GiB of private RAM for the main node process, and it takes around 5 minutes if the local cache is cleared (it ends in around a minute with cache). Its important to remember this when choosing in which server the build runs. * Integration: Gatsby does not provide out of the box integration with CMS for content authoring (like for example, page drafts). Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React), but I would wait a few more years until it becomes more mature to use it again for any future project.

Scarbutt 7y ago
Now to be honest, the global idea seems good (static websites built with React) Out of interest, what's good about building static websites with React?
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  I prefer React over any other templating lang I’ve used so far. Though I never liked Gatsby.
- azangru 7y ago
  > what's good about building static websites with React As compared to which alternatives? Personally, I find the splitting up of code into components, together with the power and expressiveness of jsx and its closeness to plain javascript, and the simplicity of updating the ui in response to changes of state to be a very compelling argument for react.

arcturus17 7y ago

I’ve been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I’ve considered using it in prod in an eCommerce site. Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it’s not even integrated yet with my CMS of choice. How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can’t find a way to justify this to my clients...

arcturus17 7y ago
Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings... You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in prod... Again, these are all solved problems in just about every other eCommerce framework! If you look at some of the Gatsby eCommerce prod examples you will see a few gorgeous sites (the Flamingo one for example) but they all have very few product references and features (no user accounts, etc) All this is to say the possible use cases for Gatsby in eCommerce seem very narrow, though I would love to be proven wrong.
- joking 7y ago
  I don't see a good fit between and ecommerce site and gatsby, on an ecoomerce site you may have to change your pages depending on the stock, and disable the buy button when there's no stock for an item. What are you going to do? redeploy the site on every purchase? Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby.
  - arcturus17 7y ago
    Yea, essentially what I'm saying in my a vs b scenario. > Or you can only list the product and make the buy button and items available come from an api, doable, but then you start to loose the simplicity of gatsby. And you still haven't solved the issue of delays between content changes and deployment... What if someone has made a bad mistake in content editing and you need to revert it? You're exposed to the whims of your build processes and infrastructure... There's no way I can sell to anyone who's played with Wordpress or Shopify "well, your changes might take anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes to be live..." That's why I'm asking, how can product and engineering teams justify this kind of thing? I'm not being facetious, I'd love to hear their perspective.

lloydatkinson 7y ago

I recommend people checkout Gridsome. It’s a similar product but for Vue.

bbx 7y ago

I really love Gatsby. It combines the best of both worlds: static sites and React. For a very long time, I've been fond of Jekyll. It's mostly because my open source projects are hosted on GitHub and Jekyll is their go-to framework. There's nothing wrong per se with Jekyll. I was simply missing some features from React. When I was working on React apps, the main benefits for me were: (i) component encapsulation and (ii) CSS Modules. It's easy to understand what a component does just by looking at it. If it gets too complicated, you can simply split it into another component. And CSS Modules are a life saver. The two hardest things in CSS are floats and naming things. That second part is solved now. My issue with React however is the whole Webpack setup, and the fact that JS is required to run the website. So when Gatsby appeared, I was pleasantly surprised to see it solved these issues. I ended up rebuilding my website with Gatsby, and I'm currently using it for 2 client projects. My only issue with Gatsby is its reliance on GraphQL. I tried understanding the GraphQL concepts and purpose, especially with its weird syntax, but it feels over-engineered. Or at least, it doesn't feel like Gatsby needs GraphQL. So I'm not sure why it's so tightly tied to it. What I end up doing for fetching/storing data is using some static JSON files. It's easy to read, to port, and to parse. I only use GatsbyJS.org the open source project, not GatsbyJS.com the service. But it seems to be similar to WordPress.org/WordPress.com, or what Ghost does. Even if the open source project somehow died, I wouldn't feel stuck with the framework ; since most of the codebase are React components, it'd be easy to port to another platform. That's another benefit.

sings 7y ago
Honest question, but why is React unique in offering component encapsulation? I see this more of a structural paradigm than something a framework allows for or limits against.
- bbx 7y ago
  It’s probably not unique in that aspect. I just happen to have quite a bit of experience in React. And that “componentization” only made sense to me when I started using React.
- tashoecraft 7y ago

merqurio 7y ago

I evaluated Gatsby, among other solutions, for our company's website. We use React in production for a large application, nothing new there, but for a static site, I thought it had an overly-complicated build pipeline. In the end, we went with Hugo[1], never regretted, huge fan of static site generators and Netlify CMS[2]. About raising that series A, I hope they have a bigger plan in mind than hosting sites or yet another CMS. If the vision is the "reinvent" the way we work on static sites, I respect that, but I don't see a business case there. [1]: https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io [2]: https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/

satvikpendem 7y ago

For those who like React static sites but dislike the complexity of Gatsby and GraphQL, check out react-static. https://github.com/react-static/react-static https://github.com/react-static/react-static YouTube example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=OqbJ5swVpDQ

bartq 7y ago

I don't really know what Gatsby is good at because I've never been target customer of it. But judging on website and docs I think its power lies in simplicity: people want to get shit together and call a day. This tool allows that. It probably won't live long, but that's not a problem, right? Most websites built with it are short lived: promotion www, sales, register forms etc.

chrshawkes 7y ago

I have tutorials on Gatsby and have used it quite a bit. I don't recommend it. I can't understand why this is getting funding? People are so much better off with a CMS like Django or Wordpress. Hell, they could use static HTML, Apache and Quill.JS and nothing else is needed. Maybe sub Quill with TinyMCE or CKEditor. There is nothing overly special about Gatsby.

wiradikusuma 7y ago

I checked their website and I still don't get what it actually is. I'm familiar with Hugo (compiles .md files to static site), Forestry (CMS for Hugo and other static site generators) and Netlify (to deploy that static site). Where does it sit, and how is it different?

fiatjaf 7y ago

In a dozen of hours I wrote Sitio[1]. Sitio generates static pages with React templates and if wanted they also become alive React components at the client. It has a simple imperative API, no GraphQL, no Webpack, any kind of datasource can be easily plugged (in fact I did plug many). It turns out Gatsby also exposes an imperative API that runs behind its fancy declarative API, and it's very similar to mine. However, I wrote mine in 12 hours. Gatsby has a big team and millions of dollars and it's been in the works for many many years. And still some weeks ago I tried to use Gatsby to generate a site with data from Trello and Instagram and couldn't, hit some bugs, but mainly hit an opaque and very complex API. Why? [1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio

dplgk 7y ago
No webpack is a big win. Thinking Gatsby is this fun & easy thing and then realizing you're going all-in on the current npm/JS insanity is not a good feature.
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  I have this great badge at the repository: [Webpack free] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f64349fa4fe7c11b/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f62616467652f7765627061636b2d667265652d6f72616e67652e737667 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fdcb107fde40edb15afb7e80f...
fiatjaf 7y ago
Worse: all the datasources were provided by plugins written by third-party indie developers working for free (and for that reason they weren't perfect, of course). What is the core team wasting their time on?

vicbun 7y ago

And we at https://simulify.com https://simulify.com are making a UI for react based static sites. Pls join our alpha.

EGreg 7y ago

“Matthews says Gatsby (the company) is now contributing about $3 million per year to open-source projects that include the core Gatsby tools and the plugin ecosystem around it.” Who should we reach out to about this funding for our open source project to integrate with Gatsby ecosystem? We have an open-source platform with tons of components like videoconferencing, events, rides etc. hosted for free on github.com .