Spike vs. X

There are tons of fantastic projects out there for generating static sites, so you may be asking yourself why would I choose spike over X? Let's make some comparisons to get a better idea:

Gulp / Grunt

There are a couple great open source projects that describe themselves as build systems, and are commonly used to generate static sites. Let's be clear that you can use gulp or grunt to accomplish the same thing as Spike does. But that would mean wiring up a bunch of configuration yourself for every project. If you are building a static site, there's no reason not to use Spike over a generic build system because Spike is built specifically for static sites. Unless you simply enjoy the process of spending bunches of hours writing and maintaining huge configuration files manually, Spike is a flat out superior option, because we have already done this for you, for free.

For comparison, you can also use an Excel spreadsheet to manage your finances, as Excel is a good general purpose tool for managing data. But a tool built specifically for managing finances is going to be a better solution for finances specifically, which is why companies like Mint have done so well.

Middleman, Jekyll, etc.

Middleman and Jekyll are great projects, but suffer from one fatal flaw -- they are written in Ruby. Tools built for the front-end tend to be written in Javascript, since you must know Javascript if you are making websites, it's the only language you can use in a browser. As such, all of the large popular and stable front-end tools emerging from the community (grunt, gulp, webpack, postcss, yeoman, react, etc) are written in Javascript. A project written in Ruby is simply not able to smoothly interoperate with these tools because they are written in different languages. In addition, if you are asking your front-end developers to use Spike, you can feel comfortable that you are not asking them to learn a second programming language every time they interact with it -- it's just Javascript, which they already know.

Hexo, Octopress, Wheat, etc.

There are a number of static site generators built specifically for blogs. If you are trying to make a blog, these are probably a great choice. Spike is not built specifically for blogs though. You can make any sort of static site with Spike, including a blog. As such you get a lot more flexibility, but you won't get the fine-tuned blog-specific feature set as you will with a blog-specific framework (unless someone makes a plugin that introduces this).