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Stoplight vs Swagger UI

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Stoplight
101
229
+ 1
9
Swagger UI
1.9K
1.7K
+ 1
207
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StopLight vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

StopLight and Swagger UI are two popular tools for designing and documenting APIs. Let's explore the key differences between the two.

  1. Applicability: StopLight offers a broader range of features beyond just API documentation, including design, mocking, and testing capabilities, making it suitable for end-to-end API lifecycle management. On the other hand, Swagger UI primarily focuses on generating interactive API documentation, making it more suitable for developers and API consumers.

  2. Interface: StopLight provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface with an emphasis on a visual approach, allowing users to design and document APIs using a visual editor. Swagger UI, on the other hand, provides a more traditional code-centric approach where APIs are defined using the OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger Specification) in JSON or YAML format.

  3. Customization: StopLight offers greater flexibility in terms of customization options, allowing users to create custom themes, templates, and styles to match their brand identity. Swagger UI, on the other hand, provides limited customization options, mainly focused on changing the visual appearance of the documentation.

  4. Integration: StopLight provides built-in integration with popular version control systems like GitHub and GitLab, allowing users to easily sync their API projects and collaborate with team members. Swagger UI, however, does not offer direct integration with version control systems and requires manual synchronization of changes.

  5. Mocking and Testing: StopLight includes built-in mocking and testing capabilities, allowing users to simulate API behavior and test their APIs directly within the tool. Swagger UI, on the other hand, does not provide native mocking and testing features and requires additional tools or services to achieve the same functionality.

  6. Pricing: StopLight offers a range of pricing plans, including free and enterprise options, allowing users to choose the plan that best fits their needs. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is an open-source project and is freely available for use without any licensing costs.

In summary, StopLight provides a comprehensive API lifecycle management solution with a visual interface, extensive customization options, built-in integration with version control systems, mocking, and testing capabilities, while Swagger UI focuses primarily on generating interactive API documentation using the OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger) in a code-centric approach.

Advice on Stoplight and Swagger UI
StackShare Editors
| 5 upvotes · 347.2K views
Needs advice
on
PostmanPostmanApiaryApiary
and
Swagger UISwagger UI

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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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 375.5K views
Recommends
on
PostmanPostman
at

I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).

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Jadenko
| 2 upvotes · 363.4K views
Recommends
on
Swagger UISwagger UI
at

I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.

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Sadik Ay
Backend Engineer · | 2 upvotes · 346.5K views
Recommends
on
PostmanPostman

I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.

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Pros of Stoplight
Pros of Swagger UI
  • 9
    Responsive team
  • 49
    Open Source
  • 34
    Can execute api calls from the documentation
  • 29
    Free to use
  • 19
    Customizable
  • 14
    Easy to implement in .Net
  • 13
    Mature, clean spec
  • 12
    API Visualization
  • 9
    Coverage
  • 6
    Scaffolding
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 5
    Vibrant and active community
  • 4
    Elegant
  • 3
    Adopted by tm forum api
  • 2
    Clear for React
  • 1
    Api
  • 1
    Can deploy API to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda

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Cons of Stoplight
Cons of Swagger UI
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 3
      Need to learn YAML and RAML
    • 2
      Documentation doesn't look that good
    • 1
      Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages
    • 1
      You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
    • 1
      Does not support hypermedia

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Stoplight?

    Stop writing thousands of lines of specification code. Our intuitive visual editors significantly cut down on design time, and are spec agnostic. Generate OAI (Swagger) and RAML specification code on demand.

    What is 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

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Stoplight?
    What companies use Swagger UI?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Stoplight or Swagger UI.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Stoplight?
    What tools integrate with Swagger UI?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Stoplight and Swagger UI?
    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.
    Postman
    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
    Insomnia REST Client
    Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
    OpenAPI
    It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
    Retrofit
    Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
    See all alternatives

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