The purpose of this website is to report results from putting Hugo up against Nift on build times. A nearly empty website was created using Hugo with 10,000 pages (repository, demo), the exact same website was replicated using Nift (repository, demo).

Read the repository readme for how to build the Hugo website. To build the Nift website run nsm build-all from a terminal/command prompt window.

The times in the following table were computed on my 2014 11" i5 Macbook Air with 8gb ram running Ubuntu 18.04 with desktop environment gnome-session-flashback. Snap was used to install both Hugo (version 0.57.2) and Nift (version 1.16).

Site Generator Real User Sys Hugo v0.57.2 4.765s 13.467s 1.326s Nift v1.16 1.479s 2.742s 2.129s Site Generator Real User Sys

Note that real build time is what really matters when it comes to checking changes and getting back to coding. Nift is the clear winner when it comes to real build time coming in basically three times as fast as Hugo at building the whole website. It looks like there is a new world's fastest website generator.

Also if you take the build updated functionality of Nift in to account (which Hugo does not have), Nift can run build-updated with real time of ~0.31 seconds on my machine. So Nift can be up to 15 times faster than Hugo at building your website.

I have checked the build times with Nift using the same website but with 20k pages and 100k pages, the build times scale linearly (ie. 20k page website build times are double the 10k page website build times, and 100k page website build times are ten times the 10k page website build times).