What is Astro?

The web framework that scales with you.
Astro builds fast content sites, powerful web applications, dynamic server APIs, and everything in-between.
source: https://astro.build/

Things Astro does well:

• Well designed website at https://astro.build/
• Gourgeous documentation at https://docs.astro.build
• Starting templates are of a great quality
• Great set of features out of the box
• Easy to add integrations with npx astro add ...

What is Eleventy?

Eleventy is a simpler static site generator
source: https://www.11ty.dev/

Things Eleventy does well:

• It has fast builds and fast web sites
• Supports a big variety of template languages
• Allows incremental migration of an existing website

When to choose Astro

I would recommend to choose Astro when:

• You want to have great out of the box experience
• You want to spend less time tinkering (adding React and Tailwind is as simple as running npx astro add react tailwind)
• You plan to have interactive page(s) (using React, Svelte, Vue, etc)

When to choose Eleventy

I would recommend to choose Eleventy when:

• You care about having the fastest builds
• You want to have truly customized website
• You want to have great flexibility and control
• You are experienced with npm and NodeJs
• You don’t mind setting up things yourself (Tailwind, PostCss, Webpack, etc)

Astro vs Eleventy

Things in common

• They both build fast websites! Blazingly fast!
• Great documentation
• Both Astro and Eleventy support plugins
• Great communities
• Starter templates

Things that are different

• Astro is a framework

  Which means that there are more things to learn than in Eleventy. On the other hand they will be well documented.

• Eleventy is designed to be simple

  Simplicity makes it highly customizable. Astro does things in it’s own way, whether you like them or not you will have to live with them and possibly work around them. With Eleventy you will have much more control and you could make it work according to your specific needs or preferences. However, you will have to set things up yourself or find a project example from the community (there are plenty!).

• Eleventy has better templating languages support (Nunjucks, Liquid, Mustache and many more)

Thank you for reading!