The State

of Jamstack
2020 Report.
In partnership with


About Kentico Kontent.
Kentico Kontent is the world’s leading cloud-based headless CMS platform. Robust
APIs, webhooks, and flexible content models give developers full control over the
structure of their content and how it’s delivered to their websites and applications.
The APIs deliver clean, structured content that can be pulled into any experience and
technology stack.

On top of this headless foundation, Kontent includes an intuitive authoring experience

that lets marketers focus on content creation and business workflows without requiring
developer involvement. This frees developers to focus on what they do best—building
engaging online experiences that look great in every channel.

Companies across a wide range of industries have built their online experiences on top
of Kontent, including Vogue, PPG, Oxford University, AC Milan, and Konica Minolta.
Additionally, Kentico is regularly included in key industry reports published by Gartner,
Forrester Research, and G2.

About this report.

The Jamstack has seen an incredible increase in popularity and usage in recent
years. The benefits of using this modern web development architecture include faster
and better performance, unbeatable scalability options, higher security, and better
developer experience. For these reasons, Jamstack sites have become very popular
among web developers over the past few years.

We at Kentico Kontent could not be blind to the significant increase in the number
of projects combining the Jamstack and headless CMSs. Seeing this trend in web
and app development, we decided to take a closer look at the current state of
Jamstack’s adoption and use. How many developers are familiar with this architecture?
How complex are their Jamstack projects? What are the most popular static site
generators? These are just a few examples of questions that interest every modern web
development enthusiast.

2 
The State of Jamstack 2020 Report draws on our global survey conducted among
hundreds of developers from the US, the UK, Germany, and Australia. It provides
answers to the above questions and much more! You will find out:

• What the top reasons for choosing the Jamstack are

• What developers love and hate about Jamstack tooling
• What CMSs and what static site generators are used
in their Jamstack projects most often

I have no plans to reveal any results in this editorial. One thing is clear to me, though.
The Jamstack popularity is growing, and its benefits and low entry barrier will ensure it
keeps growing with another generation of web developers. We at Kentico Kontent are
excited about what 2020 has in store for the Jamstack, and since you’re holding a copy
of this report, I believe you are too. Enjoy the read!

Vojtech Boril.
VP Growth & Marketing, Kentico Kontent

3 
About Luminary.
Luminary is a global leader in the implementation of Kontent and the premier Kontent
agency in Australia. Led by CTO and Kentico MVP Andy Thompson, Luminary’s
development team directly supported Kentico in building the initial boilerplate for
Kontent and continues to be involved in testing and refining the platform. Luminary
Technical Lead Emmanuel Tissera also launched the world’s first Kontent website.

Luminary is home to the largest and most experienced Kentico development team in
Australia, across both Kontent and Kentico EMS. One of Australia’s longest-standing
independent digital agencies, Luminary’s longevity and depth of experience with
Kentico has earned it a reputation as the agency of choice for many of the biggest
names in the Australian government, retail, and corporate sectors.
Why it’s time for
the Jamstack to
shine.
The business
perspective
Over the past few years, the Luminary team have seen over and over again
clients coming to us with a common set of problems arising from their digital
platform investment:

• A slow website leading to low conversions

• A feature-rich digital experience platform that is only being used as an
expensive CMS
• A rigid template structure that forces digital marketers and content editors to use
third-party landing page solutions to do their job
• Disparate content management solutions across the organization (e.g., website vs.
mobile app vs. display screens)
• Security flaws and vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed for too long
• A costly hosting infrastructure that isn’t delivering a ROI
• A frustrated group of stakeholders across marketing, digital, and IT

Any of these sound familiar? The Jamstack can help address these very real
business problems.

The benefits of the

Jamstack.
At Luminary, we have summed up the benefits of the Jamstack
for businesses in the 6 Ss of the Jamstack:

Speed

Super-fast, pre-rendered websites that are SEO-friendly and improve conversions. Add
to that improved speed to market with a streamlined development pipeline.

Stability

No more random downtime moments caused by legacy applications. Static HTML,

served at the edge, doesn’t go down.

6 Why it’s time for the Jamstack to shine. The business perspective
 Scalability

Unbeatable scaling with no web application servers or database servers needed.

Significant cost savings at scale (and highly performant!).

Security

By serving pre-rendered static HTML, we remove any potential connection to web

application servers or database servers. It’s hard to get any more secure than that.

Serviceability

This refers to the quality of the experience in designing, building, and maintaining
Jamstack-driven web experiences. The ‘maker experience’ is a critical factor in the
ongoing success of any website or application. This covers designers, developers,
content editors, digital marketers, and anyone else that is involved in the creation and
ongoing management of digital experiences.

Simplicity

The Jamstack is all about abstracting complexity to deliver ease of use for developers
and simple, blazingly fast experiences for end-users.

Buzzword or the
next big thing?
It’s certainly more than a buzzword. Big brands like Peloton, Nike, and Citrix are on
board, and Silicon Valley is throwing money at Jamstack-centric startups like Gatsby,
Netlify, Vercel, and many more.

7 Why it’s time for the Jamstack to shine. The business perspective
Most importantly, though, there are real business benefits to be had. The 6 Ss of speed,
stability, scalability, security, serviceability, and simplicity mean tangible increases in
conversion and revenue, as well as reduced risk and lower operating costs. All of this
without a huge investment.

The Jamstack is business ready and should be considered for your next digital project.

Adam Griffith.
Managing Director, Luminary

8 Why it’s time for the Jamstack to shine. The business perspective
Why it’s time for
the Jamstack to
shine.
The technology
perspective
Javascript, APIs, and Markup (HTML) have been around for literally decades.
So why the sudden wave of enthusiasm for Jamstack as an enterprise web
development platform?

JavaScript is everywhere

JavaScript has become the lingua franca for developers. What started as a simple
scripting language for adding interactivity to web pages in the 90s is now the dominant
programming language in digital.

The Cloud

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have

freed developers from the hassles of maintaining their own server infrastructure or
being tied to a single technology platform.

DevOps

Content Management systems were born to make the mundane task of updating
a website easier. The explosion of automated tools for building and deploying your
website not just quickly and regularly, but continually, has removed this barrier.

Everything as a Service

Industry-leading digital products are increasingly delivered “as a service”—available

online via subscription—rather than requiring purchase and installation on a server.
Overwhelmingly, these SaaS products provide comprehensive APIs for advanced
integration scenarios.

Content as a Service

One of the relatively recent additions to the “as a service” stable is cloud-based
Headless CMS platforms, such as Kontent. Enabling rapid modeling and management
of structured, omnichannel content while also adding features to empower marketers,

10 Why it’s time for the Jamstack to shine. The technology perspective
these Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) platforms enable websites or apps to be built
independently of traditional restrictions imposed by a CMS. Devs can then get back to
building websites the way they were supposed to be built—with HTML and JavaScript!

Modern web app frameworks

Building a complex, interactive web experience in a browser from scratch is no mean

feat, and developers will tend toward using an established framework. React and Vue.
js have emerged as clear front-runners in terms of popularity and community support
for websites. Static Site Generators (SSG), such as Gatsby or Next.js, make creating
complex and high-performing web applications delivered on the Jamstack easy.

A modern Jamstack platform

JavaScript, APIs, and Markup are nothing new. But an industry-wide move toward API-
enabled cloud services, combined with the emergence of some amazing supporting
technologies and tools has made it possible to build a modern platform for enterprise
development on the Jamstack. Assuming, of course, that you have access to a team of
very smart people to pull it all together.

Andy Thompson.
CTO, Luminary

11 Why it’s time for the Jamstack to shine. The technology perspective
Jamstack and
headless CMS are
like front end and
back end. They
need each other.
The Jamstack is trending. There’s no question about that. We at Kentico Kontent
see over ten percent month-to-month increase in projects that are built with static
site generators. But why is the Jamstack so popular, and why are more and more
developers starting to prefer it?

Performance, security,
cost effectiveness.
I used to hear these topics in every pre-project meeting. There were numbers from
Google Analytics everywhere, endless calculations of hardware requirements, we talked
about securing the administration interfaces, and, of course, budgets.

Then the Jamstack surfaced. It seemed like a complete opposite of the way we were
creating websites. But that’s not what the Jamstack is. In fact, the Jamstack is very
similar to traditional sites. I’ll explain.

On every traditional site, we start using caching at some point. Database calls, third
party services providing data, integrations, all these things are expensive. They eat
both time and resources. So we cache them as we can live with data that’s a few
minutes or a few hours old, but we can’t let the visitors wait. Later, we delete the cache
when it becomes outdated.

The Jamstack is built exactly on this foundation. We don’t build a page when a visitor
asks for it, we build it when the content changes. And not just a page, but the whole
site. Who would have thought that this change makes all the meeting topics I mentioned
earlier obsolete.

13 Jamstack and headless CMS are like front end and back end. They need each other.
Developers should develop,
editors should edit.
The last time I decided to fix a little car problem, it took me two days and three trips
to a local hardware store for supplies. And let’s be honest—a proper mechanic would
have probably finished it in one hour. Just like that, I believe developers should keep
implementing features, and content editors should keep maintaining the content. It’s
what they like and what they want to do.

Traditional websites running on one code base make this a challenge. Editors need to
wait for the first version of the website to have a place where they can work on content.
Developers are happy until that moment as then their flexibility is limited. They are no
longer the only ones working on the project.

While that can be nice teambuilding at times, the Jamstack provides a better
separation by design. It’s closely tied to headless CMSs where content editors can
independently build the content model and work on preparing the content. The system
provides them with a tailored UI that fits their needs, allows them to collaborate on
content and reuse it over time.

Their developer colleagues gain more power and responsibility with the Jamstack. They
implement the website using data from the CMS and make sure it’s always consistent
and good-looking. A headless CMS provides them with an SDK or source plugin for their
platform of choice that allows them to get content through an API comfortably.

Both of these teams can now work independently with the tools they like to use.
Moreover, the separation and reusability of content keep the organization open to new
trends and channels such as mobile applications, chatbots, or AI.

14 Jamstack and headless CMS are like front end and back end. They need each other.
The future of the Jamstack.
I believe we will see more and more people discover the benefits of static sites. Not just
developers, but also editors, project managers, CTOs, and others; the focus will turn to
content management, and editors will ask for more features they know from traditional
CMSs such as content previews, rich collaboration features, and task management.
Headless CMSs will become true cloud content hubs and will cater to content needs on
multiple channels.

We will also see a great improvement in static site generators’ performance and feature
sets. It’s likely many Jamstack sites will also use a hybrid approach, which allows some
pages to be statically generated and others server-side rendered.

Will the results of this report match my predictions? I won’t spoil the surprise just yet.
However, having read the report, I’m now going to fill a lottery ticket.

Ondrej Polesny.
Developer Evangelist, Kentico Kontent

15 Jamstack and headless CMS are like front end and back end. They need each other.
Overview of our
respondents.
We surveyed a total of 531 full-time and part-time developers working for small,
medium-sized, and large companies. Below you can see the demographic breakdown of
the respondents, including their primary programming language.

Country

Australia 24%

Germany 24%

United Kingdom 26%

United States 26%

Gender

Male 69%

Female 31%

Age

18–24 6%

25–34 27%

35–44 33%

45–54 18%

55–64 13%

65 and over 3%

17 Overview of our respondents.

Company size (employees)

2–9 7%

10–49 18%

50–249 31%

More than 249 41%

Primary programming language (developers)

JavaScript 28%

Java 23%

Python 13%

C# 12%

Other 23%

18 Overview of our respondents.

The Jamstack
survey results.
The Jamstack is a modern web development architecture
based on pre-generated HTML markup where dynamic
and interactive functionalities are handled by JavaScript,
and server-side operations are abstracted into reusable
APIs. “JAM” = “JavaScript, APIs, Markup”

1 Are you familiar with this

definition of the Jamstack?
The respondents could select only one answer.

The familiarity with the architecture decreases with the increasing age of developers.
So the younger the developer is, the more likely they know the Jamstack:

N = 531 developers
o
rn
es

no
s

no
ye

ty

s
ye

lly
ly

ly
ha
ite

ite
ea
er
ew
in

in
ith

tr
m
ef

ef
No
Ne
So
D

20% 34% 19% 13% 13%

Age

18–24 29% 48% 19% 3% 31

25–34 27% 37% 19% 9% 8% 144

35–44 19% 36% 23% 11% 11% 177

45–54 19% 29% 13% 18% 21% 94

55–64 12% 27% 15% 25% 21% 67

65 and 39% 28% 11% 22% 18

over

20 The Jamstack survey results.

2 How long have you been
working with the Jamstack?
The respondents could select only one answer.

45% of developers have been working with it for one year or longer.

N = 531 developers

ra
ye
a
an
s
ar

th
ar

r
ye

ea

ve
s
ye

s
1y

Ne
3+

Le
2

6% 17% 22% 19% 36%

The data shows that older developers (who claimed they were not familiar with the
Jamstack definition in the previous question) are not using the Jamstack.

Age

18–24 16% 42% 35% 6% 31

25–34 6% 24% 27% 24% 19% 144

35–44 8% 19% 22% 15% 36% 177

45–54 6% 10% 15% 19% 50% 94

55–64 10% 12% 16% 60% 67

65 and 17% 6% 11% 67% 18

over

21 The Jamstack survey results.

3 What are the reasons
for choosing the Jamstack
to build an app with?
The respondents had to put these seven items in order (from the most important item to
the least important one).

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

52%

47%

46%

44%

41%

37%

34%

Performance, productivity, and reliability are the top 3 reasons why developers are
choosing the Jamstack.

22 The Jamstack survey results.

4 Think of the most complex
project you’ve built with
the Jamstack. Try to
describe its complexity.
The respondents had to select one item in each line of the table below.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

The majority of developers who work with the Jamstack said their most complex
projects had:

Hundreds to thousands
of unique users served 77%

2–3 channels served 66%

2–5 services involved 58%

1–10 engineers involved 76%

5–10 level of dynamicity 51%

23 The Jamstack survey results.

5 Select the technologies
you’ve used in a
Jamstack project.
The respondents could select more than one answer.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

Websockets 35%

Serverless functions 30%

GraphQL 28%

AMP 27%

Webhooks 27%

Containers 25%

Identity Provider 23%

PWA 23%

gRPC 17%

None of them 5%

35% of developers who work with the Jamstack have used Websockets.

gRPC represents the least implemented technology (17%).

Other technologies are used by 23% to 30% of developers who work with the Jamstack.

24 The Jamstack survey results.

 6 Where do the biggest
challenges in adopting the
Jamstack architecture lie?
Try to think about all three aspects—JavaScript, APIs, Markup.

The respondents had to provide their own answer.

N = 339, developers who work with Jamstack, categorized spontaneous responses,

more than one answer possible

Training (employees),
know-how, understanding 22%

Nothing, it’s good 17%

Integrate in company 14%

Compatibility with other systems 10%

Data secure, security 9%

Price 4%

Easy to use, comfortable 4% JavaScript 2%

Upgrades 4% Speed 2%

Programming skills 4% Time 2%

Reliability 2% APIs 2%

Performance 2% Many challenges 1%

Problems with functions 2% Markup 1%

Other answer (< 1%) 3%

Do not know / no answer 17%

Developers think that understanding, knowing how to work with the Jamstack, and
training of employees are the most challenging aspects when adopting the Jamstack
architecture.

25 The Jamstack survey results.

7 Which static site
generators do you like
to develop with?
The respondents could choose up to three answers.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

Next.js 27%

Hugo 23%

Gatsby 22%

VuePress 20%

React Static 17%

Hexo 17%

Jekyll 16%

Eleventy 16%

Sapper 16%

Gridsome 13%

Nuxt 11%

Other 2%

Next.js (27%) is considered to be the most popular static site generator. It seems to
be particularly popular in Australia (31%) and Germany (35%). In the UK, Gatsby and
VuePress (both 24%) are the most popular ones, while in the US developers prefer Hugo
and VuePress (both 28%).

26 The Jamstack survey results.

“ Websites have come full circle.
They started out static, then
shifted to various models and
methodologies as dynamic elements
were added and expanded on.
Now there’s a brand new way,
where sites can be totally dynamic
and fully static, simultaneously
harnessing the powerful
benefits of both paradigms.”

Kyle Mathews.
CEO, Gatsby
8 Where do you prefer
to keep your content?
The respondents could choose up to three answers.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

43%

17%

17%

17%

15%

14%

13%

12%

12%

12%

9%

9%

8%

1%

While Google Docs seems to be preferred in general, it’s highly unlikely that it would be
a preferred option for commercial projects. For such cases, enterprise headless CMSs
such as Contentful, Kentico Kontent, or Contentstack are typically a better choice.

28 The Jamstack survey results.

9 Where do you
typically deploy and
host your projects?
The respondents could choose up to three answers.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

MS Azure 37%

AWS 34%

Netlify 21%

Own infrastruture 20%

GitHub Pages 19%

Surge 15%

Akamai 12%

Heroku 11%

Zeit 7%

Other 1%

Most developers typically deploy and host their projects in MS Azure (37%) and
AWS (34%).

29 The Jamstack survey results.

Think about the tools you’ve worked with—static site
generators, headless CMSs, and deployment providers.
Consider things like developer experience, learning curve,
productivity, reliability, collaboration features.

10 What do you love about

today’s Jamstack tooling?
The respondents had to provide their own answer.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

35%

12%

11%

8%

8%

7%

7%

6%

6%

5%

5%

5%

4% 2%

4% 4%

2% 12%

35% of developers think highly of the fact that the Jamstack is easy to use (easy to work with).

30 The Jamstack survey results.

11 What do you hate about
today’s Jamstack tooling?
The respondents had to provide their own answer.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

54%

6%

6%

3%

3%

3%

2%

2%

2%

1%

1%

4%

16%

54% of the developers seem to be satisfied with the Jamstack. The most frequently
mentioned aspect they hate is the complexity of Jamstack tooling and the process of
learning how it works (both 6%).

31 The Jamstack survey results.

12 Are you interested
in initiatives trying to
unify the Jamstack
space such as Stackbit,
Sourcebit, or Uniform?
The respondents could select only one answer.

N = 339 developers who work with the Jamstack

67%

33%

Yes No

32 The Jamstack survey results.

13 What do you think could
increase the Jamstack
adoption? Name one thing.
The respondents had to provide their own answer. Some developers shared more than
one idea, so that’s why the sum of all percentages is not equal to 100%.

Popularity, marketing 14%

Teaching of its use, training 11%

Cooperating with other systems 7%

Lower cost 6%

Simplicity to use 4%

Trust, reliability, stability 3%

Upgrades, improves 3%

Speed 3%

Flexibility 3%

Safety, security 2%

Performance, productivity 2%

Solving technical issues 2%

Other answer (< 1%) 8%

Nothing/it is good 13%

Do not know answer 31%

N = 531 developers who work with the Jamstack

The majority of developers think that marketing and increase in popularity (14%), the
teaching of its use and training (11%), and cooperating with other systems (7%) would
help increase the Jamstack adoption. 13% of developers think that the level of Jamstack
adoption is already high.

33 The Jamstack survey results.

14 What is your favorite
flavor of jam?
The respondents could select only one answer.

N = 531 developers

Strawberry 46%

Raspberry 24%

Blackberry 10%

Apricot 10%

Orange 6%

Fig 4%

34 The Jamstack survey results.

Conclusion.
While the last question about the favorite flavor of jam clearly indicated that we’re
nearing the end of this report, we at Kentico Kontent believe that 2020 is just the
beginning for the Jamstack.

The report showed us that 54% of the 531 developers from our survey are familiar with
the Jamstack definition, and 64% have been working with the Jamstack already.
These developers appreciate the performance, productivity, and reliability, which they
regard as the top 3 reasons to choose the Jamstack.

When it comes to challenges connected to adopting this architecture, developers

typically label training as the biggest one. On the other hand, 17% believe that adopting
the Jamstack architecture is not challenging at all.

What developers love about Jamstack tooling the most is that it’s easy to use and work
with (35%). More than half (54%) also said there’s nothing to hate about the Jamstack.
Overall, very positive findings for the Jamstack community!

We hope this report helped you discover why more and more developers are starting to
prefer the Jamstack and will spark discussions among those of you who are interested
in this modern way of building websites and apps.

Let us know if you like it—we would be excited to make it a tradition and bring you The
State of Jamstack annually! Until then, enjoy your next Jamstack project!

36 Conclusion.
The State
of Jamstack
2020 Report.

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