I'm using 11ty to compile Markdown, render Liquid templates, and build my blog. It's a lot like Jekyll, but it runs in JS. That's lighter & quicker for me.
This project uses Gulp to process CSS (Sass & PostCSS) and JS (Babel). This might be the biggest win over Jekyll (which allowed no customization for asset handling).
I'll work on some posts (eventually) on how I converted this over, & what you might want to know if you're considering converting from Jekyll, or setting up an 11ty site.