Alternatives to Gitbook logo

Alternatives to Gitbook

Sphinx, Confluence, Jekyll, Google Docs, and GitHub Pages are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Gitbook.
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What is Gitbook and what are its top alternatives?

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.
Gitbook is a tool in the Documentation as a Service & Tools category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Gitbook

  • Sphinx
    Sphinx

    It lets you either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with it pretty much as with a database server. ...

  • Confluence
    Confluence

    Capture the knowledge that's too often lost in email inboxes and shared network drives in Confluence instead – where it's easy to find, use, and update. ...

  • Jekyll
    Jekyll

    Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories. ...

  • Google Docs
    Google Docs

    It is a word processor included as part of a free, web-based software office suite offered by Google. It brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. ...

  • GitHub Pages
    GitHub Pages

    Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live. ...

  • MkDocs
    MkDocs

    It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes. ...

  • Hugo
    Hugo

    Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data. ...

  • OneNote
    OneNote

    Get organized in notebooks you can divide into sections and pages. With easy navigation and search, you’ll always find your notes right where you left them. It gathers users' notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network. ...

Gitbook alternatives & related posts

Sphinx logo

Sphinx

1K
297
32
Open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and...
1K
297
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PROS OF SPHINX
  • 16
    Fast
  • 9
    Simple deployment
  • 6
    Open source
  • 1
    Lots of extentions
CONS OF SPHINX
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    related Sphinx posts

    Confluence logo

    Confluence

    25.9K
    18.9K
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    One place to share, find, and collaborate on information
    25.9K
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    PROS OF CONFLUENCE
    • 94
      Wiki search power
    • 62
      WYSIWYG editor
    • 43
      Full featured, works well with embedded docs
    • 3
      Expensive licenses
    CONS OF CONFLUENCE
    • 3
      Expensive license

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    David Ritsema
    Frontend Architect at Herman Miller · | 11 upvotes · 702.5K views

    We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.

    We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.

    This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.

    See more
    Priit Kaasik
    Engineering Lead at Katana MRP · | 9 upvotes · 552.4K views

    As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:

    • Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
    • Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, Release calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
    • Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
    • And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:
    1. All feeds and conversations come together in Slack
    2. #Agile workflows in Jira
    3. InProductCommunication and #CustomerSupportChat in Intercom
    4. #Notes, #Documentation and #Requirements in Confluence
    5. #SourceCode and ContinuousDelivery in Bitbucket
    6. Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on appear.in
    7. #Logging and Alerts in Papertrail
    See more
    Jekyll logo

    Jekyll

    2K
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    Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby
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    PROS OF JEKYLL
    • 74
      Github pages integration
    • 54
      Open source
    • 37
      It's slick, customisable and hackerish
    • 24
      Easy to deploy
    • 23
      Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
    • 7
      Gitlab pages integration
    • 5
      Best for blogging
    • 2
      Low maintenance
    • 2
      Easy to integrate localization
    • 1
      Huge plugins ecosystem
    • 1
      Authoring freedom and simplicity
    CONS OF JEKYLL
    • 4
      Build time increases exponentially as site grows
    • 2
      Lack of developments lately
    • 1
      Og doesn't work with postings dynamically

    related Jekyll posts

    Dale Ross
    Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

    I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

    I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

    Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

    See more
    Josh Dzielak
    Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 491.7K views
    Shared insights
    on
    JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

    Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

    I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

    After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

    See more
    Google Docs logo

    Google Docs

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    Real-time docs collaboration
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    PROS OF GOOGLE DOCS
    • 3
      It's simple, but expansive
    • 2
      Free
    • 1
      Fast and simple
    CONS OF GOOGLE DOCS
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      Jason Barry
      Cofounder at FeaturePeek · | 10 upvotes · 342.9K views

      If you're a developer using Google Docs or Google Sheets... just stop. There are much better alternatives these days that provide a better user and developer experience.

      At FeaturePeek, we use slite for our internal documents and knowledge tracking. Slite's look and feel is similar to Slack's, so if you use Slack, you'll feel right at home. Slite is great for keeping tabs on meeting notes, internal documentation, drafting marketing content, writing pitches... any long-form text writing that we do as a company happens in Slite. I'm able to be up-to-date with everyone on my team by viewing our team activity. I feel more organized using Slite as opposed to GDocs or GDrive.

      Airtable is also absolutely killer – you'll never want to use Google Sheets again. Have you noticed that with most spreadsheet apps, if you have a tall or wide cell, your screen jumps all over the place when you scroll? With Airtable, you can scroll by screen pixels instead of by spreadsheet cells – this makes a huge difference! It's one of those things that you don't really notice at first, but once you do, you can't go back. This is just one example of the UX improvements that Airtable has to the previous generation of spreadsheet apps – there are plenty more.

      Also, their API is a breeze to use. If you're logged in, the docs fill in values from your tables and account, so it feels personalized to you.

      See more
      GitHub Pages logo

      GitHub Pages

      17.4K
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      Public webpages freely hosted and easily published.
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      PROS OF GITHUB PAGES
      • 290
        Free
      • 217
        Right out of github
      • 185
        Quick to set up
      • 108
        Instant
      • 107
        Easy to learn
      • 58
        Great way of setting up your project's website
      • 47
        Widely used
      • 41
        Quick and easy
      • 37
        Great documentation
      • 4
        Super easy
      • 3
        Easy setup
      • 2
        Instant and fast Jekyll builds
      • 2
        Great customer support
      • 2
        Great integration
      CONS OF GITHUB PAGES
      • 4
        Not possible to perform HTTP redirects
      • 3
        Supports only Jekyll
      • 3
        Limited Jekyll plugins
      • 1
        Jekyll is bloated

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      Simon Reymann
      Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

      Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

      • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
      • Respectively Git as revision control system
      • SourceTree as Git GUI
      • Visual Studio Code as IDE
      • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
      • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
      • SonarQube as quality gate
      • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
      • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
      • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
      • Heroku for deploying in test environments
      • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
      • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
      • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
      • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
      • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

      The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

      • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
      • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
      • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
      • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
      • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
      • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
      See more
      Dale Ross
      Independent Contractor at Self Employed · | 22 upvotes · 1.5M views

      I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

      I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

      Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

      See more
      MkDocs logo

      MkDocs

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      14
      A static site generator
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      PROS OF MKDOCS
      • 5
        Speed
      • 4
        Gitlab integration
      • 3
        Extensibility
      • 2
        Themes
      CONS OF MKDOCS
      • 1
        Build time increases exponentially as site grows

      related MkDocs posts

      Nikolaj Ivancic

      I want to build a documentation tool - functionally equivalent to MkDocs. The initial choice ought to be VuePress - but I know of at least one respectable developer who started with VuePress and switched to Nuxt.js. A rich set of "themes" is a plus and all documents ought to be in Markdown.

      Any opinions?

      See more
      Hugo logo

      Hugo

      1.3K
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      A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go
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      PROS OF HUGO
      • 47
        Lightning fast
      • 29
        Single Executable
      • 26
        Easy setup
      • 24
        Great development community
      • 23
        Open source
      • 13
        Write in golang
      • 8
        Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
      • 8
        Hacker mindset
      • 7
        LiveReload built in
      • 4
        Gitlab pages integration
      • 4
        Easy to customize themes
      • 4
        Very fast builds
      • 3
        Well documented
      • 3
        Fast builds
      • 3
        Easy to learn
      CONS OF HUGO
      • 4
        No Plugins/Extensions
      • 2
        Template syntax not friendly
      • 1
        Quick builds

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      John-Daniel Trask
      Co-founder & CEO at Raygun · | 19 upvotes · 324.7K views
      Shared insights
      on
      .NET.NETWordPressWordPressHugoHugo
      at

      There’s no doubt WordPress is a great CMS, which is very user friendly. When we started the company, our blog wasn’t really our top priority, and it ended up being hosted on a fairly obscure server within our setup, which didn’t really change much until recently when things become harder to manage and make significant updates.

      As our marketing team increased, the amount of traffic that found us through our content marketing increased. We found ourselves struggling to maintain our Wordpress install given the amount of theme updates, plugins and security patches needing to be applied. Our biggest driver to find an alternative solution however was just how slow Wordpress is at serving content to the end user. I know there will be die hard fans out there with ways to set things up that mean WordPress sites can load quickly, but we needed something a lot more streamlined.

      We could see in our own Real User Monitoring tool that many users were experiencing page load speeds of over five seconds, even longer in worst case scenarios. Hugo is an open source static site generator that has enabled us to reduce load times by over 500% and make our blog far more maintainable across the whole team.

      The Raygun marketing site runs on a .NET CMS called N2 but we plan to swap that out with Hugo as well in future.

      #StaticSiteGenerators #SelfHostedBloggingCms #SupportSalesAndMarketing

      See more
      Josh Dzielak
      Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 491.7K views
      Shared insights
      on
      JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

      Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

      I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

      After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

      See more
      OneNote logo

      OneNote

      132
      101
      4
      A digital notebook for capturing and organizing everything
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      + 1
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      PROS OF ONENOTE
      • 1
        Works great with OneDrive
      • 1
        Syncs quickly
      • 1
        Dark mode
      • 1
        Search text in images (OCR)
      CONS OF ONENOTE
        Be the first to leave a con

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