MkDocs vs VuePress

Overview

MkDocs

Stacks167

Followers152

Votes14

VuePress

Stacks388

Followers418

Votes8

GitHub Stars22.8K

Forks4.7K

MkDocs vs VuePress: What are the differences?

Introduction

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allows you to format text with simple and plain syntax. It is widely used for creating documentation and content for websites. MkDocs and VuePress are two popular tools that use markdown for website development. While they have some similarities, there are key differences between the two.

Customization: MkDocs offers limited customization options. It has a simple and straightforward design, allowing you to focus on content rather than design. On the other hand, VuePress provides extensive customization capabilities. It offers a theming system that allows you to customize the appearance and layout of your website according to your preferences.
Plugin Ecosystem: MkDocs has a limited number of plugins available. Although it does have some useful plugins, the options are limited compared to VuePress. VuePress has a vast ecosystem of plugins that can enhance the functionality of your website. These plugins can be used to add features like SEO optimization, analytics, and syntax highlighting, among others.
Single-Page Application vs. Static Site: MkDocs generates a static site, which means that all the content is pre-rendered and served as HTML pages. On the other hand, VuePress uses a Single-Page Application (SPA) architecture. This means that the content is loaded dynamically, allowing for a more interactive and seamless browsing experience.
Built-in Search Functionality: MkDocs lacks built-in search functionality. Although you can integrate third-party search plugins, it requires additional configuration and setup. In contrast, VuePress comes with built-in search functionality out-of-the-box. This makes it easier for users to search for specific content on your website without any additional setup.
Development Speed: MkDocs is relatively faster to set up and get started with. It has a simple configuration and minimal dependencies, making it quick and easy for beginners to use. On the other hand, VuePress can be considered more complex to set up and configure due to its extensive customization options. It requires more initial effort but provides greater flexibility in the long run.
Active Community Support: MkDocs has an active and supportive community, with regular updates and bug fixes. It is widely adopted and has a dedicated following among developers. Similarly, VuePress also has an active community, but it is relatively newer compared to MkDocs. However, VuePress's popularity is rising rapidly, and it has great community support with ongoing development and improvements.

In Summary, while MkDocs is simple and beginner-friendly with limited customization, VuePress offers extensive customization options, a wider range of plugins, a single-page application architecture, built-in search functionality, and greater flexibility in exchange for a slightly more complex setup. Both tools have active communities and can be used to build beautiful and functional websites.

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Advice on MkDocs, VuePress

Kazim

Founder & Developer at Devkind

May 13, 2020

Needs advice

Fastest and quickest way to do static HTML site which is extremely fast? Do you consider above tools or is there anything more quicker or better? This is just a one time one pager site for now, no backend required. I might have such projects in future, having something to get familiar with which can immediately come into action to develop would be great advise!

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Detailed Comparison

MkDocs	VuePress
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.	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.
-	Built-in markdown extensions optimized for technical documentation; Ability to leverage Vue inside markdown files; Vue-powered custom theme system; Automatic Service Worker generation; Google Analytics Integration; Multi-language support; A default theme with responsive layout, optional homepage, simple out-of-the-box header-based search, customizable navbar and sidebar, and auto-generated GitHub link and page edit links
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 22.8K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.7K
Stacks 167	Stacks 388
Followers 152	Followers 418
Votes 14	Votes 8
Pros & Cons
Pros 5 Speed 4 Gitlab integration 3 Extensibility 2 Themes Cons 1 Build time increases exponentially as site grows	Pros 4 It's Vue 2 Created by the vue.js developers 2 Built in text search feature Cons 3 Its Vue
Integrations
No integrations available	Vue.js Google Analytics

What are some alternatives to MkDocs, VuePress?

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.

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.

Gatsby

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

Hexo

Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

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.

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.

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

Metalsmith

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

Related Comparisons

MkDocs vs VuePress: What are the differences?

Introduction

Customization: MkDocs offers limited customization options. It has a simple and straightforward design, allowing you to focus on content rather than design. On the other hand, VuePress provides extensive customization capabilities. It offers a theming system that allows you to customize the appearance and layout of your website according to your preferences.
Plugin Ecosystem: MkDocs has a limited number of plugins available. Although it does have some useful plugins, the options are limited compared to VuePress. VuePress has a vast ecosystem of plugins that can enhance the functionality of your website. These plugins can be used to add features like SEO optimization, analytics, and syntax highlighting, among others.
Single-Page Application vs. Static Site: MkDocs generates a static site, which means that all the content is pre-rendered and served as HTML pages. On the other hand, VuePress uses a Single-Page Application (SPA) architecture. This means that the content is loaded dynamically, allowing for a more interactive and seamless browsing experience.
Built-in Search Functionality: MkDocs lacks built-in search functionality. Although you can integrate third-party search plugins, it requires additional configuration and setup. In contrast, VuePress comes with built-in search functionality out-of-the-box. This makes it easier for users to search for specific content on your website without any additional setup.
Development Speed: MkDocs is relatively faster to set up and get started with. It has a simple configuration and minimal dependencies, making it quick and easy for beginners to use. On the other hand, VuePress can be considered more complex to set up and configure due to its extensive customization options. It requires more initial effort but provides greater flexibility in the long run.
Active Community Support: MkDocs has an active and supportive community, with regular updates and bug fixes. It is widely adopted and has a dedicated following among developers. Similarly, VuePress also has an active community, but it is relatively newer compared to MkDocs. However, VuePress's popularity is rising rapidly, and it has great community support with ongoing development and improvements.

MkDocs vs VuePress

Overview