Metalsmith vs Octopress: What are the differences?

What is Metalsmith? An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator. In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

What is Octopress? A static blogging framework for hackers, based on Jekyll. Octopress is an obsessively designed framework for Jekyll blogging. It’s easy to configure and easy to deploy.

Metalsmith and Octopress belong to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Metalsmith are:

• Read template files from a directory
• Parse files for template placeholders
• Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

On the other hand, Octopress provides the following key features:

• Octopress sports a clean responsive theme written in semantic HTML5, focused on readability and friendliness toward mobile devices.
• Code blogging is easy and beautiful. Embed code (with Solarized styling) in your posts from gists, jsFiddle or from your filesystem.
• Third party integration is simple with built-in support for Pinboard, Delicious, GitHub Repositories, Disqus Comments and Google Analytics.

Metalsmith and Octopress are both open source tools. Octopress with 9.51K GitHub stars and 2.86K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Metalsmith with 7.27K GitHub stars and 640 GitHub forks.