Gatsby Netlify

Market position

Gatsby was a frontrunner in the Jamstack/composable web community and, as of 2022, the second most-used rendering framework according to the State of JavaScript survey, but it lost ground to Next.js as a general-purpose framework, while Gatsby Cloud competed against Vercel and Netlify. Its developer retention score fell from 89% in 2019 to 38% in 2022. Gatsby was used by more than 20 percent of Netlify enterprise customers at the time of the cloud consolidation. In the unified GraphQL data layer market, Valhalla Content Hub entered a space contested by Apollo GraphQL, Kong and others.

Gatsby's unified GraphQL data layer and CMS-oriented source plugin ecosystem allowed developers to integrate multiple content sources and APIs without custom glue code, and the framework was associated with high performance scores for content sites.

Technology

A React-based open-source rendering framework supporting static generation, server-side rendering, deferred static generation and cloud functions, built around a unified GraphQL data layer. A plugin ecosystem sources data from content management systems and any API-exposing service. The commercial side added cloud build, deploy and preview infrastructure, incremental builds, and the Valhalla Content Hub, an edge-first, fault-tolerant hosted GraphQL API. Gatsby Adapters, announced in August 2023, let Gatsby sites target different hosting platforms.

Go-to-market

Adoption driven by the free open-source framework and its plugin ecosystem and developer community, converting to paid cloud plans; enterprise sales and partnerships, including a long-standing partnership with Netlify prior to the acquisition.

Web developers and development teams building React websites, and enterprise teams operating large, content-heavy web properties that require composable, multi-source content architectures.

Geography

Gatsby was a US-based company; acquirer Netlify is headquartered in San Francisco.

History

Kyle Mathews began work on what became Gatsby in late 2015. The project gained traction in the Jamstack community as an open-source static-site and rendering framework with a distinctive data layer, and raised a $3.8 million seed round in 2018. Gatsby Cloud was introduced in 2019 as the commercial product, followed by a $28 million Series B led by Index Ventures in 2020. Total disclosed funding reached $46.8 million. Zack Urlocker served as CEO at the time Netlify acquired the company on February 1, 2023. Later in 2023 Netlify announced the end of service for Gatsby Cloud and folded its capabilities into the Netlify platform while continuing to maintain Gatsby JS.

Risks & controversies

Commentators attributed Gatsby's decline to the 2019 launch of Gatsby Cloud, which reportedly diverted resources from the open-source framework and made hosting on third-party platforms harder because features such as incremental builds were exclusive to Gatsby Cloud. Developers cited outdated dependencies, cold starts, slow builds and stale plugins. The post-acquisition migration from Gatsby Cloud to Netlify drew complaints, with some teams reporting cost increases of up to 120% or additional fees on equivalent plans, and a Netlify support engineer stating in August 2023 that there were no plans to bring incremental builds to Netlify, contradicting earlier statements from co-founder Kyle Mathews. Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann stated that Gatsby was not winning the framework competition against Vercel.