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  5. API Blueprint vs Slate

API Blueprint vs Slate

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Slate
Slate
Stacks101
Followers130
Votes8
API Blueprint
API Blueprint
Stacks99
Followers99
Votes2
GitHub Stars8.7K
Forks2.1K

API Blueprint vs Slate: What are the differences?

# Key Differences Between API Blueprint and Slate

API Blueprint and Slate are both popular tools used for documenting APIs. Despite serving the same purpose, they exhibit several key differences that set them apart.

1. **Syntax and Structure**: API Blueprint uses a Markdown-based syntax, making it easier for technical writers to get started. In contrast, Slate utilizes a more complex structure with HTML and CSS, offering more control over the layout and design of the API documentation.

2. **Theme Customization**: Slate provides extensive theme customization options, allowing users to create a unique and branded documentation portal. On the other hand, API Blueprint lacks this level of customization, limiting the visual appeal of the documentation.

3. **Community Support**: API Blueprint has a strong community backing and support, providing users with extensive resources and plugins to enhance their documentation. While Slate also has a supportive community, it may not offer as many resources compared to API Blueprint.

4. **Ease of Use**: API Blueprint is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a suitable choice for beginners or those looking for a quick documentation solution. In contrast, Slate may have a steeper learning curve due to its more advanced customization options.

5. **Integration with Apiary**: API Blueprint is closely integrated with Apiary, a platform that offers additional features such as mocking and testing APIs. Slate, on the other hand, is a standalone tool and does not have the same level of integration with external platforms.

6. **Version Control**: Slate supports version control systems like Git, allowing users to manage changes and updates to their documentation more effectively. While API Blueprint may also support version control, it may not offer the same level of flexibility as Slate.

In Summary, API Blueprint and Slate offer varying degrees of customization, ease of use, and integration options, catering to the diverse needs of API documentation developers.

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Detailed Comparison

Slate
Slate
API Blueprint
API Blueprint

Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.

API Blueprint is simple and accessible to everybody involved in the API lifecycle. Its syntax is concise yet expressive. With API Blueprint you can quickly design and prototype APIs to be created or document and test already deployed mission-critical APIs.

Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.;Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.;Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!;Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!;Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.;Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.;Let your users update your documentation for you — by default, your Slate-generated documentation is hosted in a public Github repository. Not only does this mean you get free hosting for your docs with Github Pages, but it also makes it's simple for other developers to make pull requests to your docs if they find typos or other problems. Of course, if you don't want to, you're welcome to not use Github and host your docs elsewhere!
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Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
8.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.1K
Stacks
101
Stacks
99
Followers
130
Followers
99
Votes
8
Votes
2
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 3
    Simple to Use
Pros
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Ecosystem of tools

What are some alternatives to Slate, API Blueprint?

Postman

Postman

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

Swagger UI

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Paw

Paw

Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful. Either you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps you build HTTP requests, inspect the server's response and even generate client code.

Apiary

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Karate DSL

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

ReadMe.io

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Appwrite

Appwrite

Appwrite's open-source platform lets you add Auth, DBs, Functions and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale, own your data, and use your preferred coding languages and tools.

Runscope

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

RAML

RAML

RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.

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