Overview

Swagger UI

Stacks2.0K

Followers1.8K

Votes207

GitHub Stars28.3K

Forks9.2K

Slate

Stacks75

Followers130

Votes8

Slate vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

Slate vs Swagger UI

Slate and Swagger UI are two popular tools used for documenting and testing APIs. Though they serve similar purposes, there are several key differences between them.

User Interface Design: Slate focuses on providing a clean and minimalistic user interface design. It uses a simple two-column layout with navigation on the left and content on the right. On the other hand, Swagger UI has a more modern and visually appealing interface with a three-column layout, which includes navigation, content, and a live API explorer.
Configuration Flexibility: Slate allows developers to customize the documentation using Markdown, making it easy to modify and adapt to specific needs. Swagger UI, on the contrary, uses OpenAPI Specification (OAS) to generate the documentation, which provides a more standardized approach but leaves less room for customization.
Ease of Use: Slate is known for its simplicity and straightforward setup process. It requires minimal configuration and is easy to get started with. Swagger UI, on the other hand, has a more comprehensive feature set, but this also makes it relatively more complex and may require additional configuration to fully utilize its capabilities.
Integration with API Ecosystem: While both tools can be used independently, Swagger UI is more widely adopted in the API ecosystem. It has better integration with the Swagger tooling ecosystem and supports more advanced features like API mocking and code generation.
Interactive Documentation: Swagger UI provides an interactive experience for exploring and testing APIs. It allows users to make API requests directly from the documentation, view responses in real-time, and experiment with different input parameters. Slate, on the other hand, focuses more on providing static documentation with a focus on readability.
Support and Community: Swagger UI has a larger user base and a more active community compared to Slate. This means that there is a wealth of resources, tutorials, and community support available for Swagger UI, making it easier to find help and resolve issues.

In summary, Slate offers a simple and customizable documentation experience, while Swagger UI provides a more feature-rich and interactive environment for exploring APIs. The choice between the two ultimately depends on the specific requirements and preferences of the project.

Advice on Swagger UI, Slate

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?"

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Swagger UI	Slate
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	Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.
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	Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. Slate is responsive, so it looks great on tablets, phones, and even print.;Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.;Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!;Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!;Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.;Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.;Let your users update your documentation for you — by default, your Slate-generated documentation is hosted in a public Github repository. Not only does this mean you get free hosting for your docs with Github Pages, but it also makes it's simple for other developers to make pull requests to your docs if they find typos or other problems. Of course, if you don't want to, you're welcome to not use Github and host your docs elsewhere!
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 2.0K	Stacks 75
Followers 1.8K	Followers 130
Votes 207	Votes 8
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	Pros 5 Easy setup 3 Simple to Use
Integrations
Node.js Git Microsoft Edge Safari Firefox Google Chrome	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Swagger UI, Slate?

Postman

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

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.

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.

Docusaurus

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

Read the Docs

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.

Gelato.io

Gelato.io is a SaaS tool for creating API documentation and developer portals.

MireDot

Generate REST documentation directly from your Java source code. This ensures always up-to-date and accurate documentation with minimal effort.

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.

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.

Ardoq

Ardoq's out of the box visualizations are automatically created in real-time. All changes and relationships are visualized simultaneously and are context sensitive. With Ardoq, you can see your documentation in the perspectives that best suit your needs.