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Sphinx vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?
Developers describe Sphinx 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. On the other hand, Swagger UI is detailed as "dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation". 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.
Sphinx belongs to "Search Engines" category of the tech stack, while Swagger UI can be primarily classified under "Documentation as a Service & Tools".
"Fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Sphinx over the competitors, whereas "Open Source" was stated as the key factor in picking Swagger UI.
Clever, triGo GmbH, and Hootsuite are some of the popular companies that use Swagger UI, whereas Sphinx is used by Webedia, Grooveshark, and Ansible. Swagger UI has a broader approval, being mentioned in 203 company stacks & 101 developers stacks; compared to Sphinx, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
Pros of Sphinx
- Fast16
- Simple deployment9
- Open source6
- Lots of extentions1
Pros of Swagger UI
- Open Source48
- Can execute api calls from the documentation34
- Free to use29
- Customizable19
- Easy to implement in .Net14
- Mature, clean spec13
- API Visualization12
- Coverage9
- Scaffolding6
- Easy to use6
- Vibrant and active community5
- Elegant4
- Adopted by tm forum api3
- Clear for React2
- Api1
- Can deploy API to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda1
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Cons of Sphinx
Cons of Swagger UI
- Need to learn YAML and RAML3
- Documentation doesn't look that good2
- Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages1
- You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting1
- Does not support hypermedia1
