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  5. Apiary vs Stack Overflow

Apiary vs Stack Overflow

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apiary
Apiary
Stacks241
Followers325
Votes109
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
Stacks70.0K
Followers61.9K
Votes893

Apiary vs Stack Overflow: What are the differences?

What is Apiary? Integrated API documentation, prototyping and testing. 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.

What is Stack Overflow? Question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.

Apiary can be classified as a tool in the "Documentation as a Service & Tools" category, while Stack Overflow is grouped under "Question and Answer Sites".

Some of the features offered by Apiary are:

  • Documentation- Organized around resources, code samples with syntax highlight, easy to explore.
  • Inspector- Users can make API calls through apiary.io, we show them how they differ from documentation.
  • Community- Opensource your API documentation on GitHub. The right channel between developers on both side of the API.

On the other hand, Stack Overflow provides the following key features:

  • Ask questions, get answers, no distractions
  • Get answers to practical, detailed questions
  • Tags make it easy to find interesting questions

"Easy to use" is the primary reason why developers consider Apiary over the competitors, whereas "Scary smart community" was stated as the key factor in picking Stack Overflow.

CircleCI, Intuit, and OpenGov are some of the popular companies that use Stack Overflow, whereas Apiary is used by Sellsuki, Pipefy, and Hazeorid. Stack Overflow has a broader approval, being mentioned in 768 company stacks & 1635 developers stacks; compared to Apiary, which is listed in 43 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.

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Advice on Apiary, Stack Overflow

StackShare
StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apiary
Apiary
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow

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.

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.

Documentation- Organized around resources, code samples with syntax highlight, easy to explore.;Inspector- Users can make API calls through apiary.io, we show them how they differ from documentation.;Community- Opensource your API documentation on GitHub. The right channel between developers on both side of the API.;Always Tested [closed alpha]- The documentation is always watching your real API and tells you whenever it gets out of sync.;Server Mock- The fastest way to static API prototype—just ‘document’ your future API and it’s up. 2 minutes to Hello World.;GitHub Integration- Store the API Blueprint in your repository, everything gets updated as soon as you commit a new version.;I/O Validation- Add a JSON Schema to the API Blueprint and the proxy will help your API users understand implementation of data structures better.;Customization [closed alpha]- The documentation and tools can be seamlessly placed on your website and gray-labeled so the friction is close to none.
Ask questions, get answers, no distractions;Get answers to practical, detailed questions;Tags make it easy to find interesting questions;You earn reputation when people vote on your posts;Improve posts by editing or commenting;Unlock badges for special achievements;Find a question to answer, or ask your own
Statistics
Stacks
241
Stacks
70.0K
Followers
325
Followers
61.9K
Votes
109
Votes
893
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 29
    Easy to use
  • 19
    Free to use
  • 12
    Traffic inspector
  • 11
    Free
  • 10
    Collaboration
Pros
  • 257
    Scary smart community
  • 206
    Knows all
  • 142
    Voting system
  • 134
    Good questions
  • 83
    Good SEO
Cons
  • 3
    No opinion based questions
  • 3
    Unfriendly moderators
  • 3
    Unfair downvoting
  • 3
    Not welcoming to newbies
  • 3
    Mean users
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Apiary, Stack Overflow?

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

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.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus

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

Read the Docs

Read the Docs

It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.

Gelato.io

Gelato.io

Gelato.io is a SaaS tool for creating API documentation and developer portals.

MireDot

MireDot

Generate REST documentation directly from your Java source code. This ensures always up-to-date and accurate documentation with minimal effort.

Quora

Quora

It connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.

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.

Slate

Slate

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

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