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Docusaurus vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?
Key differences between Docusaurus and Swagger UI
- Language and Purpose: Docusaurus is a static site generator specifically designed for creating documentation websites. It focuses on providing a clean and user-friendly interface for developers to document their projects. On the other hand, Swagger UI is a tool for visualizing and interacting with APIs. It enables developers to explore and test APIs by generating interactive documentation.
- Content Structure: Docusaurus follows a hierarchical structure for organizing content, allowing developers to create multiple nested pages and sections. It supports markdown files for easy content creation. In contrast, Swagger UI generates documentation directly from API specifications written in OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger), which follows a standardized format for describing APIs.
- User Experience: Docusaurus provides a more customizable and flexible user experience, allowing developers to customize the theme, layout, and styling to match their branding. It also provides search functionality, navigation menus, and sidebar navigation for easy content discovery. Swagger UI, on the other hand, focuses on providing a consistent and intuitive interface for interacting with APIs, with features like request/response customization, live requests, and API key authentication.
- Versioning and Releases: Docusaurus offers built-in support for versioning and releases, making it easy to manage and publish documentation for different versions of a project. It allows developers to serve specific versions of the documentation based on the user's preference. Swagger UI does not provide built-in versioning support, and developers typically need to handle versioning manually by generating separate API specifications for each version.
- Backend Integration: Docusaurus can be deployed as a static website, which makes it easy to host on various platforms without the need for a backend server. It supports integration with version control systems like Git, enabling automatic deployment when pushing changes to the repository. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is typically used alongside backend APIs, requiring a server to host the API documentation and serve the API requests.
- Target Audience: Docusaurus primarily targets developers who want to create comprehensive documentation websites for their projects, making it suitable for open-source projects, libraries, and APIs. Swagger UI, on the other hand, targets developers who need interactive documentation for exploring and testing APIs, making it more suitable for backend developers and API providers.
In summary, Docusaurus is a static site generator for creating documentation websites, offering customization, versioning, and a user-friendly experience. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is primarily focused on visualizing and interacting with APIs, providing interactive documentation based on OpenAPI specifications.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
Pros of Docusaurus
- Open Source7
- Self Hosted7
- MDX3
- I18n3
- Free to use3
- React3
- Easy customization3
- Jamstack3
- Versioning2
Pros of Swagger UI
- Open Source49
- Can execute api calls from the documentation34
- Free to use29
- Customizable19
- Easy to implement in .Net14
- Mature, clean spec13
- API Visualization12
- Coverage9
- Scaffolding6
- Easy to use6
- Vibrant and active community5
- Elegant4
- Adopted by tm forum api3
- Clear for React2
- Api1
- Can deploy API to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda1
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Cons of Docusaurus
Cons of Swagger UI
- Need to learn YAML and RAML3
- Documentation doesn't look that good2
- Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages1
- You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting1
- Does not support hypermedia1
