Highlights:

  • The cloud-based platform of Netlify is developed for web development projects and houses all the developers’ requisites.
  • Netlify stated that it chose Gatsby due to its Valhalla Content Hub.

Netlify Inc., a front-end web development startup, acquires its competitor Gatsby Inc., the company that developed the open-source GatsbyJS framework. The amount involved in the acquisition is yet to be disclosed.

Despite raising a total fund of USD 46.8 million, Gatsby found it difficult to achieve the feat like its competitors, Netlify and Vercel Inc.

Netlify is a huge and prominent player in the web development domain, with key enterprises in its customer portfolio, such as Verizon Communications Inc., Twilio Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Mattel Inc., Box Inc, and over three million developers using its platform. The company is also the creator of the popular ‘JAMstack’ movement that represents JavaScript, Application Programming Interface (API), and Markup.

The cloud-based platform of Netlify is developed for web development projects and houses all the developers’ requisites, such as test servers for validating code updates, production servers, deployment pipelines for pushing updates, and a content delivery network, embedded into a single platform. Earlier, developers had to set these elements up all by themselves.

The ability to integrate with code hosting services such as GitHub has been one of the key features of Netlify. It has become simpler for developers to associate Netlify with the code repository of the project and transform files into a functioning website with limited commands.

Chris Bach, president, and co-founder of Netlify, said, “A platform like Netlify is all about simplification. Now you just have to maintain your content and you don’t have to worry about all of the different environments, what is up-to-date and what the infrastructure looks like.

Gatsby, offering similar features through GatsbyJS framework, is another player in JAMstack market. However, the company’s platform falls short of a content delivery network.

Announcing the acquisition in its press release, Netlify stated that it chose Gatsby due to its Valhalla Content Hub. It is a centralized data layer that enables users to make multiple data sources accessible through a unified GraphQL API.

Netlify added in the announcement that Gatsby’s platform provides an ecosystem of “high-quality content management system plugins.” The company’s cloud platform can create, deploy, and preview content sites of large enterprises. Besides, it is remarkable to note that Gatsby is surging its revenue at a rate of over 100% year-over-year.

Matt Billmann, co-founder and chief executive of Netlify, detailed that the framework of Gatsby has been successful with midmarket enterprises and companies that generally build content-rich websites with thousands of pages. He also mentioned that the platform of Gatsby manages a number of websites where “the content comes not neatly from just one API, but often from a few different content sources.”

In the press release of Netlify, Billmann stated that the company can now offer developers more choice and flexibility to build composable web experiences after the acquisition of Gatsby. “The future of the web is composable architectures,” he quoted and added that he is eyeing to “open up Gatsby’s content hub and source plugin ecosystem to the diverse world of modern front-end frameworks like Astro, Next and Remix.”

Kyle Matthews, co-founder of Gatsby, reported in a blog post that Netlify will continue investing in the GatsbyJS framework. The firm is also planning to incorporate most of its Cloud features into Netifly, such as Valhalla Content Hub. “We share a belief in the future of composable architecture, and together, we will better be able to bring our cloud solution to enterprise teams and accelerate the adoption of composable,” Matthews added.

Moreover, Netlify assured to value the commitment of Gatsby to open source, entailing that it will supervise the open-source project of Gatsby. It has been planned that Gatsby’s maintainers would join the open source group of Netlify, along with the developers of frameworks such as Eleventy and Solid JS.