# Which documentation site generator tool should you choose from ?

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 :

| Name | URL | Language | Themes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MkDocs | [https://www.mkdocs.org](https://www.mkdocs.org) | python | [https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/wiki/MkDocs-Themes](https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/wiki/MkDocs-Themes) |
| Pelican | [https://getpelican.com](https://getpelican.com) | python | [https://pelicanthemes.com](https://pelicanthemes.com/) |
| Docusaurus | [https://docusaurus.io](https://docusaurus.io) | react | \- |

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.

<mark>MkDocs</mark> 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](https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-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.

<mark>Pelican</mark> is a really cool tool - but its under-rated - it has a plethora of read-made themes at [https://pelicanthemes.com](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 <mark>papyrus</mark> which utilised pretty new stuff - [https://github.com/pelican-themes/papyrus](https://github.com/pelican-themes/papyrus) - Papyrus is a fast and responsive theme built for the [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) [site g](https://getpelican.com/)enerator. It is styled using [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/)[. It support](https://tailwindcss.com/)s dark mode as well as site search via a plugin. Other themes can be found at [https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes](https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes)

<mark>Docusaurus</mark> is by Meta (Facebook) and is therefore 100% <mark>React</mark> 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 <mark>GitHub Pages</mark> 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](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 <mark>PDF</mark> : [https://github.com/jean-humann/docs-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](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.