I decided to use an open-source documentation solution for Geekflare AI. I tested many options and proceeded with Starlight. During my research, I found the following offer decent features to build documentation for products, APIs, or software.
Note: the following are open-source solutions and self-hosted, which means you need to take care of installation and hosting them by yourself. You should be familiar with basic development and hosting.
1. Docusaurus
Docusaurus is one of the highly rated open-source docs and website tools. Technically, you can use this for documentation, websites, guides, and blogs, but fundamentally, it is for creating documentations.
It is built using React, and you can write text in MDX. If needed, you can embed React component in markdown files. Docusaurus generates static files during build, which can be hosted on several platforms like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Surge, Kinsta, etc.
Some of the Docusaurus features you might find useful are:
- Translate using Crowdin, i18n, or another translation manager.
- Integrate with Algolia, Typesense search, or use local client-side search.
- Supports Typescript and JavaScript.
- Expand functionality using custom plugins.
- Integrates with leading frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, etc.
If you are thinking of using it for a blog, the good news is, it gives you an option to configure global metadata or at the page level. And, yes, sitemap too!
2. Starlight
Starlight is powered by Astro. If you don’t know, Astro is one of the fastest web framework for content sites. It is fast and easy to use, with a focus on providing a great reading experience. You can write your content in Markdown, MDX, or Markdoc and leverage the power of Astro’s ecosystem.
Some of the Starlight features you might find useful are:
- Easily customize the look and feel to match your brand.
- Benefit from the performance and features of the Astro framework.
- Use your favorite UI frameworks like React, Vue, or Svelte within your documentation.
- Built-in support for creating multilingual documentation.
- Comes with built-in search functionality, powered by Pagefind.
You can deploy Starlight on a domain, subdomain, or subfolder. I’ve deployed on a subdirectory; you can check out Geekflare AI docs.
3. Docsify
Docsify is a lightweight documentation site generator. Unlike other static site generators, it doesn’t generate static HTML files. Instead, it smartly fetches and parses your Markdown files and displays them as a webpage. You can simply create an index.html and deploy it on GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify, Vercel, AWS Amplify, or on your VM like DigitalOcean or Google Cloud.
Docsify features you might find useful are:
- No build process; everything is rendered on the fly in the browser.
- The core is small and simple to use.
- Offers multiple themes and a flexible theming system.
- Extend its functionality with plugins like image zoom, Disqus, tabs, Google Analytics, etc.
- A plugin is available to enable full-text search capabilities.
- Add emojis to your documentation.
- Support server-side rendering.
It is compatible with Vue, which allows you to add Vue content directly to your docs markdown pages. This makes sense to use if your application is based on Vue and you want to render some existing content.
I am not surprised to see Docsify is used on 100s of products’ documentation.
4. MkDocs
MkDocs is a fast and beautiful static site generator that’s geared towards building project documentation. You write your documentation in Markdown, and MkDocs generates a static website from it. It’s written in Python and is a popular choice for its extensibility.
MkDocs features:
- A wide variety of themes are available, including the popular Material for MkDocs.
- A rich ecosystem of plugins to add more functionality.
- A live-reloading development server to preview your changes as you make them.
- Supports various Markdown extensions for things like admonitions, footnotes, and more.
With the help of i18n, you can localize your docs and you can deploy to any static site hosting platform, including AWS S3.
5. Wiki.js
Wiki.js is powerful wiki software that you can use very much for documenting purposes. It’s built on Node.js and can be deployed on Docker, Kubernetes, Windows, and Linux servers. It is also available on the DigitalOcean marketplace to get it running with just one click.
To install, you need to have Node.js and SQL databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MSSQL, or SQLLite3 as prerequisites.
You can use it for both public and private knowledge bases. Content can be written in Markdown, and it offers a visual editor for those who prefer a more graphical interface.
Wiki.js features:
- Integrates with authentication providers, including social logins and enterprise solutions like LDAP and SAML.
- Supports built-in search, as well as integrations with Algolia, Elasticsearch, and more.
- Sync and back up your content to services like Git, AWS S3, Google Drive, and others.
- Fully customize the appearance of your wiki with themes and custom CSS/JS.
- Granular permissions to control who can view, edit, and manage content.
- Supports code highlighting, math expressions, and diagram rendering.
Wiki.js exposes a GraphQL API and supports more than 50 modules like Hotjar, Dropbox, Sentry, Google Drive, etc.
More options for you…
If above doesn’t satisfy your requirement or you are searching for more documentation tools, you can consider below as well.
↳ Docmost – available as a self-host and cloud version. It has a graphical interface to add content and offers a real-time collaborative editor.
↳ Colanode – all-in-one collaboration tool, an alternative to Slack and Notion. I would suggest this for internal documentation.
↳ Just the Docs – simple & responsive Jekyll theme.
That’s all! I am sure the above listed documentation solution would fit your use case. They are highly reputed, and you won’t regret picking them.
