HACKER Q&A
📣 nikkilopez

Gitbook Alternatives for API Documentation?


After using Gitbook for our API documentation for the past year, I'm looking to migrate to an open source alternative. While Gitbook has a nice UI, we're increasingly frustrated by things like limitations of their free tier and steep pricing jumps. Also their limited customization for API-specific features like request/response examples.

We're maintaining a growing open source project, and quality API documentation is critical for our adoption. I'm looking for solutions that:

- Support OpenAPI/Swagger integration

- Have good Markdown support

- Generate interactive API documentation

- Offer version control (preferably Git-based)

- Can be easily deployed in our CI/CD pipeline

- Support code samples with syntax highlighting

I've looked at Slate, Docusaurus, ReDoc, and Swagger UI, but I'd appreciate any firsthand experiences or recommendations from the community. What are you using for your API docs, and what has your experience been like with setup, maintenance, and community adoption?

  👤 kiselitza Accepted Answer ✓
Try https://voiden.md/

As per your needs it's: - Markdown (everything in markdown, including testing and specing APIs) - Let's you write your docs in markdown around the API you're designing/testing - Git-based (in-app terminal) - Code samples supported throug markdown

Plus offline, no login, no lock in, no telemetry.

It's early days so a tad rough around the edges still, but feels like the most natural way of handling APIs I ever used till date.

👤 themast
I ran into the same headache—writing an OpenAPI spec and then keeping a separate GitBook in sync felt like twice the work. We ended up trying Apidog, and the biggest win was treating the spec itself as the single source of truth: push an updated spec and the interactive docs (with request/response samples, code snippets, etc.) update automatically. It checks most of the boxes you listed:

Imports/exports OpenAPI smoothly

Markdown + syntax-highlighted code samples

Interactive “try it” UI out of the box

Git sync + CLI for CI/CD deploys

Setup was basically “import spec → tweak theme → done,” and maintenance has been minimal since. Might be worth a look if you want to stop maintaining docs separately from your API specs.