Hugo is the most widely used static site generator. It's written in Go, ships as a single binary, and is genuinely fast. Fanstatic follows many of Hugo's conventions, so users familiar with Hugo will find Fanstatic familiar — with a few deliberate differences.
content/ as Markdown with YAML front matterHugo uses Go's text/template package. The syntax is terse but quirky — pipeline chains, context binding, and the lack of a named page object make non-trivial templates hard to read:
{{ range where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "blog" }}
{{ .Title }}
{{ end }}
Fanstatic uses Liquid, the same language as Shopify and Jekyll. It's expressive, readable, and has an explicit page object:
{% assign posts = site.RegularPages | where: 'Section', 'blog' %}
{% for post in posts %}
{{ post.Title }}
{% endfor %}
Hugo supports YAML, TOML, and JSON config files. Fanstatic uses YAML exclusively (fanstatic.yaml), which eliminates format ambiguity.
Hugo front matter keys are typically camelCase or lowercase. Fanstatic uses PascalCase (Title, Date, Tags). This is consistent throughout — front matter, template variables, and site config all use the same casing.
Fanstatic is built on .NET. If you're a C# developer, you can read and contribute to the source, run the build tools you already know, and integrate Fanstatic into .NET-based workflows. It also ships with a C# API documentation generator.
See Fanstatic for Hugo Users for a field-by-field migration guide.
See Feature Comparison for a detailed table of which Hugo features are implemented in Fanstatic.