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Introduction
Docusaurus will help you ship a beautiful documentation site in no time.
Building a custom tech stack is expensive. Instead, focus on your content and just write Markdown files. Ready for more? Use advanced features like versioning, i18n, search and theme customizations.
Check the best Docusaurus sites for inspiration and read some testimonials.
Docusaurus is a static-site generator. It builds a single-page application with fast client-side navigation, leveraging the full power of React to make your site interactive. It provides out-of-the-box documentation features but can be used to create any kind of site (personal website, product, blog, marketing landing pages, etc).
gatsby
Gatsby is packed with a lot of features, has a rich ecosystem of plugins, and is capable of doing everything that Docusaurus does. Naturally, that comes at a cost of a higher learning curve. Gatsby does many things well and is suitable for building many types of websites. On the other hand, Docusaurus tries to do one thing super well - be the best tool for writing and publishing content.
GraphQL is also pretty core to Gatsby, although you don't necessarily need GraphQL to build a Gatsby site. In most cases when building static websites, you won't need the flexibility that GraphQL provides.
Many aspects of Docusaurus v2+ were inspired by the best things about Gatsby and it's a great alternative.
Docz is a Gatsby theme to build documentation websites. It is currently less featured than Docusaurus.
Next.js
Next.js is another very popular hybrid React framework. It can help you build a good documentation website, but it is not opinionated toward the documentation use-case, and it will require a lot more work to implement what Docusaurus provides out-of-the-box.
Nextra is an opinionated static site generator built on top of Next.js. It is currently less featured than Docusaurus.
VuePress
VuePress has many similarities with Docusaurus - both focus heavily on content-centric website and provides tailored documentation features out of the box. However, VuePress is powered by Vue, while Docusaurus is powered by React. If you want a Vue-based solution, VuePress would be a decent choice.
MkDocs
MkDocs is a popular Python static site generator with value propositions similar to Docusaurus.
It is a good option if you don't need a single-page application and don't plan to leverage React.
Material for MkDocs is a beautiful theme.
Docsify
Docsify makes it easy to create a documentation website, but is not a static-site generator and is not SEO friendly.
GitBook
GitBook has a very clean design and has been used by many open source projects. With its focus shifting towards a commercial product rather than an open-source tool, many of its requirements no longer fit the needs of open source projects' documentation sites. As a result, many have turned to other products. You may read about Redux's switch to Docusaurus here.
Currently, GitBook is only free for open-source and non-profit teams. Docusaurus is free for everyone.
Jekyll
Jekyll is one of the most mature static site generators around and has been a great tool to use — in fact, before Docusaurus, most of Facebook's Open Source websites are/were built on Jekyll! It is extremely simple to get started. We want to bring a similar developer experience as building a static site with Jekyll.
In comparison with statically generated HTML and interactivity added using tags, Docusaurus sites are React apps. Using modern JavaScript ecosystem tooling, we hope to set new standards on doc sites' performance, asset building pipeline and optimizations, and ease to set up.