Maud renders 14-17x faster than Tera 2.0. That's also the least useful fact in this post — the absolute delta is ~15 microseconds. Benchmarks, escaping, ecosystem health, and a decision framework that doesn't hinge on either.
One task dashboard, one shared domain model, two templating layers. Both compile, both render byte-identical HTML — and the differences that show up along the way are the ones that matter in a real codebase.
Tera 2.0 landed in June 2026 and quietly broke the tidy 'compile-time vs runtime' story everyone tells about Rust templating. Part 1 of three: the two architectures, and what changed.