I’m interested in why Ghost.org changed from Gatsby to Hugo
Personally, I love Gatsby, and I’m redoing my site to use it.
I’m interested in why Ghost.org now uses Hugo, feedback from you, with much more experience than me, would be interesting.
Thanks!
I can’t speak on the Ghost teams motivations, but from my own experience moving from Jekyll and Gatsby, it’s even faster, the templating engine is nicer (though Go still has a few quirks), and over all the structure is simpler.
I run Ghost for a few people and non-profits (its perfect for people who live in the real world), but my personal blog runs on Hugo. It cuts through 7,000+ posts like butter 
I’m replicating my blog with Gatsby, I immediately fell in love with it.
I initially found it a bit complicated.
I think that being static site generators the speed is really good for both frameworks, my site with Gatsby and 2400 articles is incredibly fast.
probably the real difference is in the learning curve, with Hugo I think it is considerably faster to achieve a decent skill in handling it.
I’d like to know the motivations of the Ghost team.
Also if you can send me the link of your site developed with Hugo, even in private, I’d like to see it.
I can’t speak to everything that was bad with our Gatsby site because it wasn’t my domain but the two biggest issues were complexity and performance.
Gatsby introduces a ton of (in most cases imo) unnecessary complexity both in the developer experience and in the front-end rendering. The front-end complexity caused us issues with Gatsby trying to be too clever by trying to make a static site be more like a single-page-app, reducing page load performance and outright breaking things at times, especially when service workers were involved.
On the build performance front, the difference between Gatsby and Hugo is so far apart it’s crazy. We had ~10min builds with Gatsby and no working option for incremental builds, with Hugo full site builds are <5s.
Of course, both SSGs have their pros and cons so I don’t want to knock Gatsby unnecessarily, just that for our use-cases Hugo was the clear winner.
Thanks, I really appreciate your response.
Indeed, as I said before, gatsby is really complex for some mechanisms, perhaps for the most part, but easy and intelligent for others.
I will try to replicate my site also using Hugo, it would be interesting to compare the performances also in my case.
I don’t think there’s a ghost-starter version with Hugo, as there is with Gatsby, right? I did not find it.