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Top 23 Documentation Open-Source Projects
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AppSignal
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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storybook
Storybook is the industry standard workshop for building, documenting, and testing UI components in isolation
Project mention: 7 Free Tools and Resources for Building Well-Structured React Applications | dev.to | 2026-05-07Storybook is a tool for developing and documenting UI components in isolation. You write stories that render individual components with specific props, and Storybook displays them in a standalone browser environment that is separate from the main application. The v8 release significantly reduced configuration complexity, making it practical to add to an existing project without a major setup investment.
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mermaid
Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
Is this not open source enough for your purposes?
https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid
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AppFlowy
Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is the AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The leading open source Notion alternative.
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tldr is perfect when man pages are too detailed and you only need the common examples.
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Kargo
Stop Scripting Promotions. Start Shipping with Kargo. Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now.
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Project mention: Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-09-11
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Project mention: Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-08-25
You've probably just gotten used to it so you don't notice see it anymore: https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython
(Note some of these are outdated, but some of them only mention that towards the end of the section rather than the beginning)
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Project mention: GitBook: The open source front end for GitBook doc sites | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-07-27
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Wiki.js is a modern wiki platform built with Node.js and Vue.js. It uses PostgreSQL for storage, supports multiple editor types (Markdown, WYSIWYG, HTML), and integrates with Git for version-controlled documentation. Current stable version is 2.5. Wiki.js site
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If you are setting up a similar lightweight developer blog with MkDocs Material, this should save you a couple of hours.
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Two open source dramas in one week? Get the popcorn. From one of the links[0]:
> I do not see him as qualified to keep this project maintainership and if I had the choice, would I remove him.
…where “him” is Tom Christie, aka lovelydinosaur, the original author from what I can tell, and the copyright holder from the license file.
I don’t know what’s going on, but if someone contributing to one of my projects, that I wrote, started a public conversation about how to remove me, my public response might appear as that person disappearing from the project.
Sure, feel free to follow the license and fork the project. Make it clear that it’s a fork, though. It feels misleading to describe it as a continuation of the existing project.
[0] https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/4088
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docmost
Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software. It is an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion.
Project mention: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-19I’m building Docmost, a self-hosted alternative to Notion and Confluence.
It’s open-source, easy to self-host and feature-packed.
GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost.
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docs
Docs is an open-source text editor: web-native, made for real-time collaboration, cleanly structured documents and sub-documents with full ownership of your data. Built to scale with Django and React. (by suitenumerique)
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quarkdown
🪐 Markdown with superpowers: from ideas to papers, presentations, websites, books, and knowledge bases.
Project mention: Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-08 -
architecture-decision-record
Architecture decision record (ADR) examples for software planning, IT leadership, and template documentation
I maintain many open source projects and deal with many kinds of spam, including via email, phone, git pull requests that look real, and much more.
Today Microsoft GitHub sent me a new kind of spam, clearly AI, and what looks like a new major category of problems for open source developers until Microsoft can figure out better security.
See for yourself-- this is the Architecture Decision Record repository that I maintain, that is about software engineering architecture such as software stack choices and technical documentation.
https://github.com/architecture-decision-record/architecture-decision-record/issues/108
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In our JSDoc comments we describe our endpoints to using a set of tags, you can look at the different tags and what they do over on JSDoc's website but here's what we've used and why.
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Skill_Seekers
Convert documentation websites, GitHub repositories, and PDFs into Claude AI skills with automatic conflict detection
Project mention: Turn Docs, Code and PDFs into Claude AI Skills in Minutes | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-07 -
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Documentation discussion
Documentation related posts
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Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results
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Animation in Bevy: The Big Picture
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Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
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I counted how many startup credit programs a machine can actually check
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We started writing docs for AI agents, not humans — and made it an open standard
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Building an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) Library
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Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?
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A note from our sponsor - Kargo
akuity.io | 13 Sep 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Documentation projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the-art-of-command-line | 161,397 |
| 2 | storybook | 91,049 |
| 3 | mermaid | 90,194 |
| 4 | AppFlowy | 76,503 |
| 5 | Docusaurus | 66,238 |
| 6 | tldr | 63,692 |
| 7 | professional-programming | 51,510 |
| 8 | cheat.sh | 41,735 |
| 9 | devdocs | 39,431 |
| 10 | wtfpython | 37,079 |
| 11 | docsify | 31,506 |
| 12 | gitbook | 29,026 |
| 13 | Wiki.js | 28,895 |
| 14 | mkdocs-material | 27,426 |
| 15 | MkDocs | 22,430 |
| 16 | docmost | 21,628 |
| 17 | BookStack | 19,037 |
| 18 | TOAST UI Editor | 18,006 |
| 19 | docs | 16,810 |
| 20 | quarkdown | 16,107 |
| 21 | architecture-decision-record | 15,785 |
| 22 | JSDoc | 15,457 |
| 23 | Skill_Seekers | 14,951 |
Sponsored
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.
Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
www.appsignal.com