Alternatives to Read the Docs logo

Alternatives to Read the Docs

Gitbook, Confluence, Sphinx, MkDocs, and GitHub Pages are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Read the Docs.
69
288
+ 1
22

What is Read the Docs and what are its top alternatives?

It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.
Read the Docs is a tool in the Documentation as a Service & Tools category of a tech stack.
Read the Docs is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Read the Docs's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Read the Docs

  • Gitbook
    Gitbook

    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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • GitHub Pages
    GitHub Pages

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

  • Postman
    Postman

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

  • Swagger UI
    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 ...

  • jsdoc
    jsdoc

    JSDoc 3 is an API documentation generator for JavaScript, similar to JavaDoc or PHPDoc. You add documentation comments directly to your source code, right along side the code itself. The JSDoc Tool will scan your source code, and generate a complete HTML documentation website for you. ...

Read the Docs alternatives & related posts

Gitbook logo

Gitbook

215
344
10
Document Everything! For you, your users and your team
215
344
+ 1
10
PROS OF GITBOOK
  • 6
    Prueba
  • 4
    Integrated high-quality editor
CONS OF GITBOOK
  • 1
    No longer Git or Open
  • 1
    Just sync with GitHub

related Gitbook posts

Confluence logo

Confluence

25.9K
18.9K
202
One place to share, find, and collaborate on information
25.9K
18.9K
+ 1
202
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

related Confluence posts

David Ritsema
Frontend Architect at Herman Miller · | 11 upvotes · 702.4K 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 · 552.3K 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
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
+ 1
32
PROS OF SPHINX
  • 16
    Fast
  • 9
    Simple deployment
  • 6
    Open source
  • 1
    Lots of extentions
CONS OF SPHINX
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Sphinx posts

    MkDocs logo

    MkDocs

    144
    147
    14
    A static site generator
    144
    147
    + 1
    14
    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
    GitHub Pages logo

    GitHub Pages

    17.4K
    12.7K
    1.1K
    Public webpages freely hosted and easily published.
    17.4K
    12.7K
    + 1
    1.1K
    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

    related GitHub Pages posts

    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
    Postman logo

    Postman

    92.2K
    78.8K
    1.8K
    Only complete API development environment
    92.2K
    78.8K
    + 1
    1.8K
    PROS OF POSTMAN
    • 490
      Easy to use
    • 369
      Great tool
    • 276
      Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
    • 156
      Easy setup, looks good
    • 144
      The best api workflow out there
    • 53
      It's the best
    • 53
      History feature
    • 44
      Adds real value to my workflow
    • 43
      Great interface that magically predicts your needs
    • 35
      The best in class app
    • 12
      Can save and share script
    • 10
      Fully featured without looking cluttered
    • 8
      Collections
    • 8
      Option to run scrips
    • 8
      Global/Environment Variables
    • 7
      Shareable Collections
    • 7
      Dead simple and useful. Excellent
    • 7
      Dark theme easy on the eyes
    • 6
      Awesome customer support
    • 6
      Great integration with newman
    • 5
      Documentation
    • 5
      Simple
    • 5
      The test script is useful
    • 4
      Saves responses
    • 4
      This has simplified my testing significantly
    • 4
      Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
    • 4
      Easy as pie
    • 3
      API-network
    • 3
      I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
    • 3
      Mocking API calls with predefined response
    • 2
      Now supports GraphQL
    • 2
      Postman Runner CI Integration
    • 2
      Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
    • 2
      Continuous integration using newman
    • 2
      Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
    • 2
      Runner
    • 2
      Graph
    • 1
      <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
    CONS OF POSTMAN
    • 10
      Stores credentials in HTTP
    • 9
      Bloated features and UI
    • 8
      Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
    • 7
      Poor GraphQL support
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 3
      Not free after 5 users
    • 3
      Can't prompt for per-request variables
    • 1
      Import swagger
    • 1
      Support websocket
    • 1
      Import curl

    related Postman posts

    Noah Zoschke
    Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 2.7M views

    We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

    Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

    Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

    This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

    Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

    Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

    Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 4.7M views

    Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

    • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
    • npm as package manager
    • NestJS as Node.js framework
    • TypeScript as programming language
    • ExpressJS as web server
    • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
    • Postman as a tool for API development
    • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
    • JSON Web Token for access token management

    The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

    • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
    • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
    • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
    • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
    See more
    Swagger UI logo

    Swagger UI

    2.1K
    1.7K
    207
    A Collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation
    2.1K
    1.7K
    + 1
    207
    PROS OF SWAGGER UI
    • 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
    CONS OF SWAGGER UI
    • 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

    related Swagger UI posts

    Noah Zoschke
    Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 2.7M views

    We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

    Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

    Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

    This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

    Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

    Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

    Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 4.7M views

    Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

    • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
    • npm as package manager
    • NestJS as Node.js framework
    • TypeScript as programming language
    • ExpressJS as web server
    • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
    • Postman as a tool for API development
    • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
    • JSON Web Token for access token management

    The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

    • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
    • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
    • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
    • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
    See more
    jsdoc logo

    jsdoc

    750
    154
    5
    An API documentation generator for JavaScript
    750
    154
    + 1
    5
    PROS OF JSDOC
    • 2
      Far less verbose
    • 1
      Simpler type safe than TypeScript
    • 1
      No compiler needed
    • 1
      Does almost everything TS does
    CONS OF JSDOC
      Be the first to leave a con

      related jsdoc posts

      Salina Acharya
      Senior Software Engineer at Datamine Software · | 6 upvotes · 145.2K views
      Shared insights
      on
      jsdocjsdocDocusaurusDocusaurusReactReact

      Hello, I need to write documentation for my React codebase. I am tossing between Docusaurus and jsdoc. I liked everything about Docusaurus but then it doesn't seem to generate a web file like jsdoc does once the code is commented with the required tags. I was hoping I could get some advice on which tool to go with for my React application.

      See more