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  5. StopLight vs Swagger UI

StopLight vs Swagger UI

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Swagger UI
Swagger UI
Stacks2.1K
Followers1.8K
Votes207
GitHub Stars28.3K
Forks9.2K
Stoplight
Stoplight
Stacks110
Followers233
Votes9

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.

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Advice on Swagger UI, Stoplight

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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Detailed Comparison

Swagger UI
Swagger UI
Stoplight
Stoplight

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

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.

The UI works in any development environment, be it locally or in the web;Allow end developers to effortlessly interact and try out every single operation your API exposes for easy consumption;Quickly find and work with resources and endpoints with neatly categorized documentation;Cater to every possible scenario with Swagger UI working in all major browsers
Powerful API modeling tools;Robust HTTP request maker;One click hosted documentation;Dynamic API Mocking;API Transformation;Automatic API modeling
Statistics
GitHub Stars
28.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.1K
Stacks
110
Followers
1.8K
Followers
233
Votes
207
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 49
    Open Source
  • 34
    Can execute api calls from the documentation
  • 29
    Free to use
  • 19
    Customizable
  • 14
    Easy to implement in .Net
Cons
  • 3
    Need to learn YAML and RAML
  • 2
    Documentation doesn't look that good
  • 1
    Does not support hypermedia
  • 1
    Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages
  • 1
    You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
Pros
  • 9
    Responsive team
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
Git
Git
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge
Safari
Safari
Firefox
Firefox
Google Chrome
Google Chrome
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Swagger UI, Stoplight?

Postman

Postman

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

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.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus

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

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