I've been trying out some documentation site generator tools out there and I tried 3 of them to test. These were not randomly chosen but picked 3 from a lot after reading about many of the ones there are online. This is for a product documentation at work for our internal cloud CRM product. I don't have screenshots or sample code snippets, since I tried this on my work laptop, so here is an overall birds-eye view :
Because I had to focus solely on the documentation than on the development for the product documentation (like customising the documentation code for whatever reason) I had to go with the default theme or use any pre-made theme that the tool supports natively without 0 edits from my side.
All three content format are in MarkDown and stored in .md files.
MkDocs is by far the oldest among the three and very widely used in the past. But I found customising the look and feel a bit overwhelming. I had to edit not just CSS but config files. If you are using the existing default theme or a pre-made theme like material, then you’re good to go. Maybe if I had spent some more time editing theme source files I could’ve achieved the desired output - but time was a contraint.
Pelican is a really cool tool - but its under-rated - it has a plethora of read-made themes at https://pelicanthemes.com but I didn’t find any super good design-wise. I feel like, designers seem to be excluded from this project. Had there been some designers this would showcase cooler looking themes. One theme I particularly like is papyrus which utilised pretty new stuff - https://github.com/pelican-themes/papyrus - Papyrus is a fast and responsive theme built for the Pelican site generator. It is styled using Tailwind CSS. It supports dark mode as well as site search via a plugin. Other themes can be found at https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes
Docusaurus is by Meta (Facebook) and is therefore 100% React based and has no server-side dependency since the build creates a directory of static files that can be deployed to any host that does not support any server-side processing like GitHub Pages and Amazon S3. Design-wise, the default design itself looks awesome and has a default content that we can use as a boilerplate to edit. has a nice page showcasing sites using Docusaurus which looks good - https://docusaurus.io/showcase - and for documentation for users to read as a tutorial and/or for reference should look ultimately good UI wise since its sort of a manual. And there is a plugin to convert to PDF : https://github.com/jean-humann/docs-to-pdf - this does not seem to be exclusive to Docusaurus but all the examples shown relate to Docusaurus only.
I ended up using Docusaurus which has a faster launch life-cycle.
Also my former colleague mentioned this to me : “I personally love Docusaurus; very user-friendly as compared to other static generators out in the market.”
PS 1 : I loved the UI of gitbook (gitbook.com) but I couldn’t get the open-source version of GitBook (https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook) to install & run (Module not found: Can't resolve '@gitbook/emoji-codepoints). But if you’re not looking for self-hosted one and are ready to pay for a managed one, then try GitBook’s paid plans as a service.
PS 2 : If you don’t want to code in MarkDown and / or you’re not a tech person to write docs other than in Word, then you must checkout writage.com which is a one-time paid ($29) plugin for Microsoft Word that you can export your documentation from Word DOCX to .MD format.
