Alternatives to MkDocs logo

Alternatives to MkDocs

Sphinx, Gitbook, Jekyll, Docsify, and Hugo are the most popular alternatives and competitors to MkDocs.
129
151
+ 1
14

What is MkDocs and what are its top alternatives?

It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.
MkDocs is a tool in the Search Engines category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to MkDocs

  • Sphinx
    Sphinx

    It lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with it pretty much as with a database server. ...

  • Gitbook
    Gitbook

    It is a modern documentation platform where teams can document everything from products, to APIs and internal knowledge-bases. It is a place to think and track ideas for you & your team. ...

  • Jekyll
    Jekyll

    Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories. ...

  • Docsify
    Docsify

    Docsify generates your documentation website on the fly without generating static html files. Instead, it loads and parses your Markdown files and displays them as a website. ...

  • Hugo
    Hugo

    Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data. ...

  • Docusaurus
    Docusaurus

    Docusaurus is a project for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites. ...

  • VuePress
    VuePress

    A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects. ...

  • Pelican
    Pelican

    Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown. ...

MkDocs alternatives & related posts

Sphinx logo

Sphinx

902
32
Open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and...
902
32
PROS OF SPHINX
  • 16
    Fast
  • 9
    Simple deployment
  • 6
    Open source
  • 1
    Lots of extentions
CONS OF SPHINX
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Sphinx posts

    Gitbook logo

    Gitbook

    219
    10
    Document Everything! For you, your users and your team
    219
    10
    PROS OF GITBOOK
    • 6
      Prueba
    • 4
      Integrated high-quality editor
    CONS OF GITBOOK
    • 1
      No longer Git or Open
    • 1
      Just sync with GitHub

    related Gitbook posts

    Jekyll logo

    Jekyll

    1.9K
    230
    Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby
    1.9K
    230
    PROS OF JEKYLL
    • 74
      Github pages integration
    • 54
      Open source
    • 37
      It's slick, customisable and hackerish
    • 24
      Easy to deploy
    • 23
      Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
    • 7
      Gitlab pages integration
    • 5
      Best for blogging
    • 2
      Low maintenance
    • 2
      Easy to integrate localization
    • 1
      Huge plugins ecosystem
    • 1
      Authoring freedom and simplicity
    CONS OF JEKYLL
    • 4
      Build time increases exponentially as site grows
    • 2
      Lack of developments lately
    • 1
      Og doesn't work with postings dynamically

    related Jekyll posts

    Dale Ross
    Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.6M views

    I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

    I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

    Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

    See more
    Josh Dzielak
    Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 529.1K views
    Shared insights
    on
    JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

    Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

    I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

    After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

    See more
    Docsify logo

    Docsify

    34
    0
    A documentation site generator without the static html files
    34
    0
    PROS OF DOCSIFY
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF DOCSIFY
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Docsify posts

        Hugo logo

        Hugo

        1.3K
        206
        A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go
        1.3K
        206
        PROS OF HUGO
        • 47
          Lightning fast
        • 29
          Single Executable
        • 26
          Easy setup
        • 24
          Great development community
        • 23
          Open source
        • 13
          Write in golang
        • 8
          Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
        • 8
          Hacker mindset
        • 7
          LiveReload built in
        • 4
          Gitlab pages integration
        • 4
          Easy to customize themes
        • 4
          Very fast builds
        • 3
          Well documented
        • 3
          Fast builds
        • 3
          Easy to learn
        CONS OF HUGO
        • 4
          No Plugins/Extensions
        • 2
          Template syntax not friendly
        • 1
          Quick builds

        related Hugo posts

        John-Daniel Trask
        Co-founder & CEO at Raygun · | 19 upvotes · 342.9K views
        Shared insights
        on
        .NET.NETWordPressWordPressHugoHugo
        at

        There’s no doubt WordPress is a great CMS, which is very user friendly. When we started the company, our blog wasn’t really our top priority, and it ended up being hosted on a fairly obscure server within our setup, which didn’t really change much until recently when things become harder to manage and make significant updates.

        As our marketing team increased, the amount of traffic that found us through our content marketing increased. We found ourselves struggling to maintain our Wordpress install given the amount of theme updates, plugins and security patches needing to be applied. Our biggest driver to find an alternative solution however was just how slow Wordpress is at serving content to the end user. I know there will be die hard fans out there with ways to set things up that mean WordPress sites can load quickly, but we needed something a lot more streamlined.

        We could see in our own Real User Monitoring tool that many users were experiencing page load speeds of over five seconds, even longer in worst case scenarios. Hugo is an open source static site generator that has enabled us to reduce load times by over 500% and make our blog far more maintainable across the whole team.

        The Raygun marketing site runs on a .NET CMS called N2 but we plan to swap that out with Hugo as well in future.

        #StaticSiteGenerators #SelfHostedBloggingCms #SupportSalesAndMarketing

        See more
        Josh Dzielak
        Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 529.1K views
        Shared insights
        on
        JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

        Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

        I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

        After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

        See more
        Docusaurus logo

        Docusaurus

        239
        35
        Easy to maintain open source documentation websites
        239
        35
        PROS OF DOCUSAURUS
        • 8
          Open Source
        • 7
          Self Hosted
        • 3
          Free to use
        • 3
          React
        • 3
          Easy customization
        • 3
          Jamstack
        • 3
          MDX
        • 3
          I18n
        • 2
          Versioning
        CONS OF DOCUSAURUS
          Be the first to leave a con

          related Docusaurus posts

          Salina Acharya
          Senior Software Engineer at Datamine Software · | 6 upvotes · 163.8K views
          Shared insights
          on
          jsdocjsdocDocusaurusDocusaurusReactReact

          Hello, I need to write documentation for my React codebase. I am tossing between Docusaurus and jsdoc. I liked everything about Docusaurus but then it doesn't seem to generate a web file like jsdoc does once the code is commented with the required tags. I was hoping I could get some advice on which tool to go with for my React application.

          See more
          VuePress logo

          VuePress

          365
          8
          A static-site generator built by the Vue.js team
          365
          8
          PROS OF VUEPRESS
          • 4
            It's Vue
          • 2
            Created by the vue.js developers
          • 2
            Built in text search feature
          CONS OF VUEPRESS
          • 3
            Its Vue

          related VuePress posts

          Nikolaj Ivancic

          I want to build a documentation tool - functionally equivalent to MkDocs. The initial choice ought to be VuePress - but I know of at least one respectable developer who started with VuePress and switched to Nuxt.js. A rich set of "themes" is a plus and all documents ought to be in Markdown.

          Any opinions?

          See more
          Pelican logo

          Pelican

          88
          28
          A static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic
          88
          28
          PROS OF PELICAN
          • 7
            Open source
          • 6
            Jinja2
          • 4
            Implemented in Python
          • 4
            Easy to deploy
          • 3
            Plugability
          • 2
            RestructuredText and Markdown support
          • 1
            Easy to customize
          • 1
            Can run on Github pages
          CONS OF PELICAN
            Be the first to leave a con

            related Pelican posts