Front-end web development platform startup Netlify Inc. today announced that it has acquired rival Gatsby Inc., creator of the open-source GatsbyJS framework, for an undisclosed amount.
Gatsby successfully raised a total of $46.8 million, but the company struggled to achieve the same traction as Netlify and another competitor, Vercel Inc.
Netlify counts major enterprise customers such as Twilio Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Box Inc., Mattel Inc., and over 3 million developers using its platform, making it a leader in the web development business. A much bigger player. It stands for JavaScript, API, Markup and is the creator of the so-called “JAMstack” movement.
The cloud-based Netlify platform is designed for web development projects and includes everything a developer needs: a production server, a test server to validate code updates, a deployment pipeline to push updates. , content delivery networks, etc.) into a single platform. Previously, developers had to set up all these elements themselves.
One of Netlify’s key features is its ability to integrate with code hosting services such as GitHub. So a developer can link her Netlify to the project’s code repository and use a few commands to transform those files into a functional website.
“A platform like Netlify is all about simplicity,” Netlify co-founder and president Chris Bach said in a 2020 interview about SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, theCUBE. “Now we just need to maintain the content and not worry about everything in different environments, what is current and what the infrastructure looks like.”
Gatsby is another player in the JAMstack market, offering similar functionality through the GatsbyJS framework, but their platform is particularly lacking in a content delivery network.
In the press release announcing the acquisition, Netlify said one of the reasons it chose to acquire Gatsby was for Valhalla Content Hub. Valhalla Content Hub is a centralized data layer that allows users to access various data sources through a unified GraphQL application programming interface.
Gatsby’s platform provides not only a cloud platform for building, deploying and previewing large-scale enterprise content sites, but also an ecosystem of “high-quality content management system plugins,” Netlify said in an announcement. Netlify added that Gatsby is generating more than 100% revenue year-over-year.
Matt Biilmann, co-founder and CEO of Netlify, told The New Stack that the Gatsby framework is being used by many small businesses and enterprises that typically create thousands of pages of highly content-rich websites. Gatsby’s platform handles many websites where “content often comes from several different content sources, not just one API,” he said. I explained.
In a statement accompanying Netlify’s press release, Biilmann said the Gatsby acquisition will give developers more flexibility and choice when building composable web experiences. increase. “The future of the web is a composable architecture,” he says, adding, “Gatsby’s content is a hub and source.” It added that it plans to “open up to a diverse world.”
In a separate blog post, Gatsby co-founder Kyle Matthews said Netlify will continue to invest in the GatsbyJS framework. He also plans to integrate many Gatsby Cloud features into Netlify, such as Valhalla Content Hub. “We share his belief in the future of Composable architecture, and together we will be able to bring our cloud his solutions to his enterprise teams and accelerate adoption of Composable.” okay,” he added.
Netlify also pledged to honor Gatsby’s commitment to open source and said it would take over stewardship of the Gatsby open source project. The plan is for Gatsby maintainers to join Netlify’s own open source group, along with the creators of frameworks like Solid JS and Eleventy.
