Eleventy's whole design philosophy is minimal abstraction — it doesn't impose a framework, a component model, or an opinion about how your content should be structured. For developers who find Gatsby or even Astro too opinionated, that's exactly the appeal. It's also, depending on what you actually want, either a feature or extra work you didn't need to take on.
For the wider field of options, see best developer blogging platforms.
What Eleventy gets right
Eleventy treats templating as a choice, not a mandate — Markdown, Nunjucks, Liquid, Handlebars, and several others all work, often mixed within the same project. There's no required data layer, no GraphQL, no client-side JavaScript unless you add it. For a developer who wants to understand exactly what's happening at every step, this transparency is genuinely valuable, and the learning curve is gentler than Gatsby's or Hugo's templating languages for anyone coming from a JS background.
Where it costs you
"Minimal abstraction" means you assemble the rest yourself. RSS and sitemap generation exist as community plugins (@11ty/eleventy-plugin-rss, various sitemap plugins) that you install and configure rather than get by default. OG image generation typically means wiring up @11ty/eleventy-img or a similar tool and building your own template. None of it is hard individually — it's the accumulation of small setup tasks before you've published a single post, and each is a dependency you're now responsible for keeping current.
There's still a build-and-deploy step too: run Eleventy, push the output to Netlify or Vercel, and repeat for every post.
Where Blogizi differs
Blogizi has no templating layer to configure because there's no build step at all — write a Markdown file with frontmatter, run blogizi publish path/to/post.md, and it's live. Sitemap, canonical URLs, and per-post OG images matched to your blog's theme are handled automatically rather than assembled from plugins — see the technical SEO checklist.
The actual decision
Pick Eleventy if: you want full visibility into every part of the build — templating, data flow, output — and don't mind assembling RSS, sitemap, and OG image generation yourself as your project grows.
Pick Blogizi if: you'd rather that assembly work not exist in the first place, and you're fine trading some low-level control for a publish command that just works. See blogging from your terminal for what that looks like day to day.