VitePress is a lightweight SSG powered by Vite and Vue 3, designed for fast documentation generation. It leverages Vite's modern build tools for quick rendering and supports Markdown out of the box, making it ideal for simple and efficient documentation sites.

Gatsby is built on React and has a large ecosystem of plugins, themes, and a strong community. It integrates well with various headless CMSs, APIs, and data sources, allowing for flexible content management and dynamic site generation.

VuePress is a Vue.js-based SSG that generates a static site for each Markdown file. It supports custom themes, plugins, and has a built-in Markdown parser, making it versatile for creating documentation, blogs, and content-rich sites.

VitePress focuses on a simple Markdown-centric approach for content. It does not have built-in data fetching capabilities like GraphQL, but it allows for custom Vue components and scripts within Markdown files for dynamic content.

Gatsby uses GraphQL for data fetching, allowing developers to query data from multiple sources (APIs, CMSs, files) in a unified way. This provides flexibility and efficiency in how data is retrieved and rendered on the site.

VuePress allows for custom data fetching through Vue components and supports asynchronous content rendering. It does not have a built-in data fetching layer, but developers can create components that fetch data as needed.

VitePress benefits from Vite's fast build and HMR capabilities, providing a smooth development experience. It is optimized for quick rendering of Markdown content, but performance largely depends on how the site is structured and the complexity of the content.

Gatsby automatically optimizes images, code splitting, and prefetching to ensure fast load times. Its build process generates highly optimized static assets, making it one of the fastest SSGs available.

VuePress generates static HTML files and supports performance optimizations like lazy loading, but it requires more manual configuration compared to Gatsby. The performance can be enhanced through custom plugins and optimizations.

VitePress provides a simple theming system with support for custom layouts and styles. It is less complex than Gatsby, making it easy to implement basic customizations quickly, but it may lack some advanced theming features.

Gatsby offers extensive theming and customization options through its plugin architecture, allowing developers to create highly tailored designs and functionalities. It supports CSS-in-JS, styled-components, and traditional CSS, providing flexibility in styling.

VuePress has a robust theming system that allows for deep customization of the site’s appearance. It supports multiple themes, and developers can create their own themes using Vue components, providing a high level of flexibility.

VitePress Example

npm init vitepress my-docs
cd my-docs
npm install
npm run dev

• Create a simple Markdown page

# My Documentation

This is a simple page created with VitePress.

• Add a custom layout

<template>
  <div class="custom-layout">
    <header>My Custom Header</header>
    <main><slot /></main>
    <footer>My Custom Footer</footer>
  </div>
</template>

• Use Vue components in Markdown

# My Documentation

<my-vue-component />

Gatsby Example

npx gatsby new my-gatsby-site
cd my-gatsby-site
npm run develop

• Fetch data from a headless CMS

import { graphql } from 'gatsby';

export const query = graphql`
  query {
    allContentfulBlogPost {
      nodes {
        title
        slug
      }
    }
  }
`;

• Optimize images with Gatsby Image

import { GatsbyImage, getImage } from 'gatsby-plugin-image';

const BlogPost = ({ data }) => {
  const image = getImage(data.contentfulBlogPost.image);
  return <GatsbyImage image={image} alt={data.contentfulBlogPost.title} />;
};

• Create a dynamic page

export const createPages = async ({ graphql, actions }) => {
  const { createPage } = actions;
  const result = await graphql(`
    query {
      allContentfulBlogPost {
        nodes {
          slug
        }
      }
    }
  `);

  result.data.allContentfulBlogPost.nodes.forEach((node) => {
    createPage({
      path: node.slug,
      component: path.resolve('./src/templates/blogPost.js'),
      context: { slug: node.slug },
    });
  });
};

VuePress Example

npm install -g vuepress
mkdir my-docs
cd my-docs
echo '# Hello VuePress' > README.md
vuepress dev .

• Create a custom theme

mkdir -p .vuepress/theme
# Add theme files here

• Add a plugin

// .vuepress/config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    ['@vuepress/plugin-example', { /* options */ }]
  ]
};