StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Documentation As A Service And Tools
  5. Rest.li vs Swagger UI

Rest.li vs Swagger UI

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Swagger UI
Swagger UI
Stacks2.1K
Followers1.8K
Votes207
GitHub Stars28.3K
Forks9.2K
Rest.li
Rest.li
Stacks14
Followers39
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.5K
Forks556

Rest.li vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Rest.li and Swagger UI are both popular tools used in API development, each with its own unique features and functionalities. Understanding the key differences between these two tools can help developers make informed decisions on which one to choose for their projects.

1. **Architecture:** Rest.li is a framework for building RESTful APIs that enables developers to define APIs using a domain-specific language, while Swagger UI is a tool for documenting and visualizing RESTful APIs. Rest.li provides a more structured approach to API development, while Swagger UI focuses on helping users interact with and understand APIs through its user-friendly interface.
   
2. **Interactive Documentation:** Rest.li does not provide out-of-the-box interactive documentation capabilities, making it more suitable for experienced developers who are comfortable working with code. On the other hand, Swagger UI offers interactive documentation that allows users to explore and test APIs without the need to write any code, making it more accessible to a wider audience.
   
3. **Code Generation:** Rest.li supports code generation for multiple programming languages, allowing developers to automatically generate client libraries and server stubs based on their API definitions. Swagger UI also offers code generation capabilities, but it primarily focuses on generating interactive documentation for APIs.
   
4. **Community Support:** Rest.li is supported by a smaller community compared to Swagger UI, which is backed by the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) and has a larger user base. The extensive community support for Swagger UI provides users with access to a wealth of resources, tutorials, and plugins to enhance their API development experience.
   
5. **Customization:** Rest.li offers more flexibility in terms of customization, allowing developers to tailor their APIs to meet specific requirements. Swagger UI, while customizable to a certain extent, has limitations in terms of how much users can modify the visual presentation of their API documentation.
   
6. **Compatibility:** Rest.li is tailored for LinkedIn's tech stack and is best suited for projects that require a similar infrastructure. On the other hand, Swagger UI is more flexible and can be integrated with a wide range of tech stacks, making it a versatile choice for developers working on diverse projects.

# Summary

In summary, Rest.li and Swagger UI differ in their architecture, interactive documentation capabilities, code generation support, community backing, customization options, and compatibility with different tech stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Swagger UI, Rest.li

StackShare
StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

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?"

382k views382k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Swagger UI
Swagger UI
Rest.li
Rest.li

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

Rest.li is an open source REST framework for building robust, scalable RESTful architectures using type-safe bindings and asynchronous, non-blocking IO. Rest.li fills a niche for applying RESTful principals at scale with an end-to-end developer workflow for buildings REST APIs that promotes clean REST practices, uniform interface design and consistent data modeling.

The UI works in any development environment, be it locally or in the web;Allow end developers to effortlessly interact and try out every single operation your API exposes for easy consumption;Quickly find and work with resources and endpoints with neatly categorized documentation;Cater to every possible scenario with Swagger UI working in all major browsers
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
28.3K
GitHub Stars
2.5K
GitHub Forks
9.2K
GitHub Forks
556
Stacks
2.1K
Stacks
14
Followers
1.8K
Followers
39
Votes
207
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 49
    Open Source
  • 34
    Can execute api calls from the documentation
  • 29
    Free to use
  • 19
    Customizable
  • 14
    Easy to implement in .Net
Cons
  • 3
    Need to learn YAML and RAML
  • 2
    Documentation doesn't look that good
  • 1
    Does not support hypermedia
  • 1
    Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages
  • 1
    You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
Git
Git
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge
Safari
Safari
Firefox
Firefox
Google Chrome
Google Chrome
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Swagger UI, Rest.li?

Postman

Postman

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

Paw

Paw

Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful. Either you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps you build HTTP requests, inspect the server's response and even generate client code.

Apiary

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Karate DSL

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

ReadMe.io

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Appwrite

Appwrite

Appwrite's open-source platform lets you add Auth, DBs, Functions and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale, own your data, and use your preferred coding languages and tools.

Runscope

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

RAML

RAML

RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus

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

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope