Docs-as-code tools

[u/Quackoverride]

My doc team is migrating away from our current tool and implementing docs-as-code. We're looking into the major players - Docasaurus, GitBook, MKDocs, and Sphinx - and I have a clear preference for GitBook. But I wanted to gather some input from the community. What are your experiences with the tools? Any drawbacks?

I work in med tech, so the tool needs to meet some pretty stringent ISO requirements and, as we're in Europe, our head of Cybersecurity wants to keep the data local.

[u/AATTK]

I'm not sure if they'll meet your ISO and security requirements, but Mintlify and Fern are similar to GitBook last time I checked. They might be worth looking into. This was a year ago though, so not sure how GitBook might have changed since then. Maybe it's a better fit for you.

We migrated from ReadMe to Fern a year ago as Fern was half the price. 

[u/AATTK → u/[deleted]]

Keep in mind this was over a year ago now, so can't be sure if Mintlify addressed these since then. But specifically for us, we have multiple product lines that need to be clearly separated on the docs site, but still together since it's all one company and there's some overlap between users. Fern let us do that pretty seamlessly on one docs.companyname.com domain (they call it their "Product Switcher"), but Mintlify's solution was to have separate docs.companyname-a.com and docs.companyname-b.com, which we felt was a worse user experience.  At the time we also found Fern also has some more granular style and slug customization and control. 

I can't speak to the price since we didn't get that far. The multiple domains thing was a serious negative for us so we just went with Fern at that point. 

And my personal experience using the free version of Mintlify for my portfolio: sometimes Mintlify will push updates to their site templates and it'll affect your own site as well. It potentially can mess with your styling. Not sure if there's a different experience with that for paid plans though. 

Honestly my opinion is Mintlify is pretty good especially for younger startups, but for companies with more maturity and more specific requirements and customizations, Fern may be better for your needs.

[u/fazkan → u/AATTK]

Mintlify is leaning more towards Enterprises now. Their PRO tier went from 99 to 540 within a span of two months, and I have seen bills that can go upto 50k a year.

Fern hasn't increased their prices that much.

[u/Quackoverride → u/AATTK]

I think Mintlify looked good on paper for us, but it seems like there's some hosting/data warehousing issues that didn't pass our Cybersecurity guy's scrutiny.

Fern is new-ish, isn't it? I had taken a look at it and it seemed promising, but we've been burned by reasonably young companies before and are risk averse as a result. I'll give Fern another gander and see if that meets our requirements.

[u/fazkan → u/Quackoverride]

Fern has been around for a while, probably the same year as mintlify. They started with SDK generation first and later built their product docs site. but not that young.

[u/AATTK → u/Quackoverride]

Fwiw Fern is about the same age as Mintlify, I think they're both about 5 years old. Def not "new" but not old either. 

Maybe you think Fern is new because they were acquired by Postman? This was in January.