If you have ever been wondering what the best options are when it comes to working with Storyblok and Svelte vs. SvelteKit, you have come to the right place.

First of all, let's start by saying both Svelte and SvelteKit are great options - Congrats on your choice ;) The outstanding developer experience, lovely community and great learning experience are part of what makes Svelte & SvelteKit great 🎉

Now let's dive into it: Svelte vs. SvelteKit - what's your go to when working with a headless CMS like Storyblok?

The answer is: it probably depends. (As always). Let's explore.

What is Svelte?

Svelte is a modern JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. It allows developers to get creative, create reactive & high-performing applications. The fact that Svelte compiles your application at build time rather than at runtime makes it more performant and reduces application size.

A big benefit of Svelte is its reactivity: Svelte updates the DOM "surgically" when the state of the app changes. Paired with the minimalistic code and straightforward syntax is probably what makes it so popular.

Checkout Rich Harris' talk "Rethinking Reactivity"

What is SvelteKit?
SvelteKit is to Svelte, what Next.js is to React: it's a higher-level framework build on top of Svelte. It comes with additional functionality, including server-side rendering, routing and code-splitting. All of these features improve the developer experience and help you build more performant apps - which makes it a great option for building more complex web apps.

Which one should you choose when working with a headless CMS?

So, if you are planning on building a simple web app with Storyblok as your headless CMS, Svelte might be a solid choice. If you are planning on including more advanced features and would like to use SSR, SvelteKit might make your life a little easier.

As you see, it depends ;)

If you are interested in getting started with Storyblok and SvelteKit, our Ultimate Tutorial Series might be a helpful resource. Go checkout part 1, "Add a headless CMS to SvelteKit in 5 Minutes" and let us know what you think!

Have you worked with Storyblok and Svelte or SvelteKit? What's your experience? Which one do you prefer and for what use cases? We are super curious to learn more!