gitbook VS mdBook

GitBook is a well-known online platform for developing, sharing, and publishing technical documentation. Although it’s not open source, it offers free and paid plans, with the free plan having limited features and functionalities. The paid plans unlock more features, such as custom domains, team collaboration, and advanced analytics.

GitBook — Platform for capturing and documenting technical knowledge — from product docs to internal knowledge bases and APIs. Free plan for individual developers.

Visit GitBook and sign up for an account.

A buddy of mine started looking at https://www.gitbook.com/

GitBook hasn't been open source since October 2018 (https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook) and software is usually judged by its most recent version. GitBook in its current form is a proprietary web service.

VSCodium does exclude the proprietary features of Visual Studio Code, but I don't see how that should disqualify VSCodium from being open source. In fact, I use VSCodium frequently and I am satisfied with its feature set. VSCodium is also maintained by someone who is not employed by Microsoft, so I don't think it's fair to say that it is intentionally designed to be inferior to Visual Studio Code.

GitBook is a collaborative documentation tool that allows anyone to document anything—such as products and APIs—and share knowledge through a user-friendly online platform.

Contributors and collaborators will do PR through code programming or using the design block builder gitbook.com

I'm responsible for a number of Java products. I try to provide high-quality Javadoc for all public library interfaces, library user's guides where appropriate, and development guides for applications. The latter two take the form of MDBook documents (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/), with the document source living in the GitHub repo so that it's tied to the particular software release in a natural way.

My org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an idea of the feature set.)

(While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)

If you want the lowest friction, open source, easily extensible Markdown to Web, Kindle, PDF, etc. tool, highly recommend mdBook: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook it’s written in Rust, but you don’t have to know any Rust to use it. And then wing is all CSS; for which there are many good (free) themes.

Interesting enough there seems to be an open PR for that: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/pull/1918