Which is the Best Static Site Generator and Why?

It's 2020, and by far, I think Next.js should be at the top of this list. Ease of you and the Developer Experience. Gatsby is my second choice.

React Static
I've created sites in both React-Static and Gatbsy - in each case the data came from a headless CMS.
I switched to React-Static as the CMS integration was easier.
That said this was a couple of years ago and both appear to have developed / matured since then.

This blog post from the creator of React-Static highlights the key differences between the two - the differences back in 2017.

11ty was recommended to me as being simple to configure and there was a good tutorial on configuring it for github pages. I use it for my resume and blog (that gets relayed to here) the content is in markdown with Nunjucks templates that are fairly straightforward.

I prefer jekyll, but perhaps that is because that is the one that I'm most familiar with. It is easy to setup a jekyll site. The entry is even more seamless because you can setup your github page with jekyll and slowly step in without ever installing anything on your machine. Customizing can be done in baby steps from whichever theme you first use. There are so many already available themes for different types of sites.

I played with gatsby a little, but it did not drive me to change from jekyll.

Is there one for angular or dotnet ?

Not on the list, but a wonderful gem, Jigsaw. I build all new simple sites with it. I tried Hugo but found Jigsaw far easier. Highly recommended for PHP/Laravel devs looking to utilize their knowledge with a static site generator, but I think it's pretty easy to use regardless. I found it much easier than Hugo, which is the only other one I've tried.

As mentioned in other comments, better is too broad, but for me:

• Hugo: it's an executable. No need to install ruby/python/etc if you don't code on those languages. Also, it's FAST.
• Gatsby: if you like React, it's awesome.

Is Netlify one of the list?

github.com/facebook/docusaurus

Eleventy is a pleasure to work with.

May not be the best, but I use nanoc.ws/ for my site for 2 reasons:

• The view template language is ERB. I'm a ruby dev and I'm most comfortable with erb than any other templates like liquid etc
• It allows to setup multiple blogs for a single site easily. I have 3 in my blog now: npras.in/tech/, npras.in/general/, npras.in/books/. (They don't have rss yet, but I'll add them soon.)

I've tried Wordpress, Jekyll, Octopress and Hugo in the past and I felt limited with all of them. (Jekyll and Hugo had too many features, Hugo was in Go which I don't know and I wasn't sure if Octopress will last.)

Nanoc isn't perfect either. It's a DIY for your blog. You have to write code for many things that are freely available in the other platforms. But it gives me the flexibility. Allows me to use erb and yield.

And I don't know why the other platforms assume people want just one blog per site. I blog about work in my tech blog, and post book reviews and kindle highlights in the book blog and post everything else in the general blog. I don't want to mix it up and I have tech friends who are never interested in my personal life and vice-versa.

Here is a good article about how to create your blog site using Gatsby.
zeptobook.com/create-your-blog-sit...

I use Gatsby for all my static sites. It's SEO features, Easy Integration with Contentful and other Headless CMS, Speed and Ease of Use.

I felt like because i already know React, it was an easy next step.
Experimenting with Hugo as well.

I used Middleman in the past. It inspired me to create Monkeyman, a Scala static site generator. But Scala isn't really the language of the web, so I moved on to Metalsmith, after finding Wintersmith. Metalsmith is quite nice. It doesn't restrict you in any way. A Metalsmith plugin is really easy to implement, and there's quite an extensive set of plugins already available.