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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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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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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 374.2K views

I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).

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I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.

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Sadik Ay
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I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.

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Pros of Slate
Pros of Swagger UI
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 3
    Simple to Use
  • 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

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Cons of Slate
Cons of Swagger UI
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 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

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Slate?

    Slate helps you create beautiful API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API.

    What is 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

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Slate?
    What companies use Swagger UI?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Slate or Swagger UI.
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    What tools integrate with Slate?
    What tools integrate with Swagger UI?
      No integrations found

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      What are some alternatives to Slate and Swagger UI?
      Postman
      It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
      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.
      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.
      Docusaurus
      Docusaurus is a project for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites.
      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.
      See all alternatives