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StopLight vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?
StopLight and Swagger UI are two popular tools for designing and documenting APIs. Let's explore the key differences between the two.
Applicability: StopLight offers a broader range of features beyond just API documentation, including design, mocking, and testing capabilities, making it suitable for end-to-end API lifecycle management. On the other hand, Swagger UI primarily focuses on generating interactive API documentation, making it more suitable for developers and API consumers.
Interface: StopLight provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface with an emphasis on a visual approach, allowing users to design and document APIs using a visual editor. Swagger UI, on the other hand, provides a more traditional code-centric approach where APIs are defined using the OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger Specification) in JSON or YAML format.
Customization: StopLight offers greater flexibility in terms of customization options, allowing users to create custom themes, templates, and styles to match their brand identity. Swagger UI, on the other hand, provides limited customization options, mainly focused on changing the visual appearance of the documentation.
Integration: StopLight provides built-in integration with popular version control systems like GitHub and GitLab, allowing users to easily sync their API projects and collaborate with team members. Swagger UI, however, does not offer direct integration with version control systems and requires manual synchronization of changes.
Mocking and Testing: StopLight includes built-in mocking and testing capabilities, allowing users to simulate API behavior and test their APIs directly within the tool. Swagger UI, on the other hand, does not provide native mocking and testing features and requires additional tools or services to achieve the same functionality.
Pricing: StopLight offers a range of pricing plans, including free and enterprise options, allowing users to choose the plan that best fits their needs. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is an open-source project and is freely available for use without any licensing costs.
In summary, StopLight provides a comprehensive API lifecycle management solution with a visual interface, extensive customization options, built-in integration with version control systems, mocking, and testing capabilities, while Swagger UI focuses primarily on generating interactive API documentation using the OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger) in a code-centric approach.
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 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.
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.
Pros of Stoplight
- Responsive team9
Pros of Swagger UI
- Open Source49
- 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 Stoplight
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