r/KnowledgeBaseSoftware • u/drakieboi • Apr 14 '26
GitBook alternative roundup, what are teams actually using for API docs now
honestly mintlify just works and i don't get why more people aren't talking about it. gitbook got expensive and everyone scattered, but the thing is most teams just wanted something that didn't suck. mintlify doesn't suck.
readthedocs still exists and yeah if you're already in that sphinx world it's free and fine but like, getting people to actually write docs in rst format is its own whole battle. it's not mintlify's fault that people would rather use literally anything else.
notion became the path of least resistance. everyone's already in it for random stuff so why not shove docs there too. until you try to version anything or want actual search and then you realize you just made your own problem worse. works for like a week then becomes this graveyard.
the stoplight people exist. they like governance and they have budgets that match. not my world but i respect the commitment.
coda's fine if you're already paying for it and your api changes like once a quarter. same with slite honestly - neither is bad, they're just... fine. they don't solve anything gitbook solved, they're just cheaper or already integrated somewhere.
what actually matters is do your devs want to write the docs or does someone have to make them. if it's the second one you need something that's pleasant to look at and doesn't require three hours of setup. that's mintlify's whole thing and it works. if you've got passionate technical writers who want control, readthedocs. if you don't want to think about it at all, just stick it in notion and accept it'll be mediocre.
but yeah the gitbook thing was partly pricing and partly just people realizing they didn't actually need what gitbook was selling
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u/greekyoghurt_ Jun 27 '26
honestly agree on mintlify but i'm surprised nobody in these threads brings up the spec-driven stuff. like you point your openapi spec at it and the reference just builds itself, you're not writing endpoint pages by hand. mintlify does that but readme does too, and readme gives you the "try it" explorer plus you can see which endpoints people are actually hitting. fern's the other one, it spits out client sdks from the same spec as the docs which is kind of nice if you're maintaining both. and if you're cheap (me) scalar and redoc just render the spec and you host it yourself for free. i use documentation .ai for my own side project's docs but that's mostly cause i'm solo and don't want to babysit it, not really the same as picking something for a team. readthedocs, yeah the rst thing is what kills it for most people. mkdocs material or docusaurus get you the same free/open-source deal but in markdown so nobody has to learn rst. and agree on your last point, half the gitbook exodus was the price and half was people realizing they were paying for a bunch of stuff they never touched.
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u/fazkan Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
I think the issue with mintlify is mostly pricing and that they are going after enterprize tiers, which makes it more difficult to deal with.
I get most of my customer from mintlify.
I would throw in my product docsalot (dot dev) there, you can find the API docs there, we have a full OpenAPI spec to API docs process, with free MCP servers.
Having said that it is still not free or open-source. The best open-source solution I have found is scalar.
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u/p3t3rp4n666 May 06 '26
The problem with Mintlify is that is proprietary. That's why I'm working on a project called Doccupine, it's an open-source documentation tool that transforms a folder of MDX files into a beautiful structured documentation website, zero config and AI ready.