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MkDocs

Stacks98

Followers142

+ 1

Votes14

Sphinx

Stacks750

Followers291

+ 1

Votes32

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MkDocs vs Sphinx: What are the differences?

Developers describe MkDocs as "A static site generator *". 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. On the other hand, *Sphinx** is detailed as "Open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and integration simplicity in mind". Sphinx 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 Sphinx pretty much as with a database server. A variety of text processing features enable fine-tuning Sphinx for your particular application requirements, and a number of relevance functions ensures you can tweak search quality as well.

MkDocs belongs to "Static Site Generators" category of the tech stack, while Sphinx can be primarily classified under "Search Engines".

According to the StackShare community, Sphinx has a broader approval, being mentioned in 42 company stacks & 73 developers stacks; compared to MkDocs, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.

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Pros of MkDocs

Pros of Sphinx

5
Speed
4
Gitlab integration
3
Extensibility
2
Themes

16
Fast
9
Simple deployment
6
Open source
1
Lots of extentions

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Cons of MkDocs

Cons of Sphinx

1
Build time increases exponentially as site grows

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What is 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.

What is 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.

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What companies use MkDocs?

What companies use Sphinx?

See which teams inside your own company are using MkDocs or Sphinx.

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What tools integrate with MkDocs?

What tools integrate with Sphinx?

Spinal CMS

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What are some alternatives to MkDocs and Sphinx?

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.

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.

Docsify

Docsify generates your documentation website on the fly without generating static html files. Instead, it loads and parses your Markdown files and displays them as a website.

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.

Docusaurus

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

See all alternatives

MkDocs vs Sphinx

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Pros of MkDocs

Pros of Sphinx

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Cons of MkDocs

Cons of Sphinx

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What is MkDocs?

What is Sphinx?

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What companies use MkDocs?

What companies use Sphinx?

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What tools integrate with MkDocs?

What tools integrate with Sphinx?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

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