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Redocly / Redoc

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OpenAPI documentation renderer + enterprise governance platform. 25.6K stars, 1.15M npm/week (highest raw downloads for API docs renderers). Unique SOAP support and strongest OpenAPI linting.

Score 78

Where it wins

1.15M npm/week — highest raw download count for any API docs renderer

25.6K stars — massive installed base

Only platform supporting SOAP APIs

Strongest OpenAPI linting and style enforcement

Enterprise governance features for compliance requirements

Where to be skeptical

Development velocity slowing — last push 6 weeks ago, last release Sep 2025

Fern+Postman is a growing competitive threat

OSS Redoc renderer is solid but not innovating

437 open issues

Editorial verdict

The enterprise governance pick for API documentation. 25.6K stars, 1.15M npm/week — most downloaded API docs renderer. Only platform supporting SOAP. Strongest OpenAPI linting. Development velocity has slowed (last push 6 weeks ago, last release Sep 2025). Fern+Postman is a growing competitive threat.

Related

Documentation

#06of 12

Enterprise API documentation with compliance requirements, SOAP support, and strong OpenAPI linting

Swagger UI

95

The original interactive API documentation renderer. 28.7K stars, 603K npm/week combined. Actively maintained with weekly releases (v5.32.1, Mar 2026). OpenAPI 3.1.2 support. The universal baseline.

Docusaurus

92

Meta's open-source docs framework. Largest community (64K stars, 765K npm/week), built-in versioned docs, massive plugin ecosystem. The incumbent safe default for large OSS projects.

MkDocs Material

92

Python ecosystem's default docs framework. 26.3K stars, 4.2M PyPI weekly downloads (highest of ANY docs tool). Now in maintenance mode — creator building Zensical as successor with 4-5x faster builds.

Astro Starlight

91

Astro-based docs framework shipping zero client-side JS by default. Go-compiled dev server, multi-framework component support (React, Svelte, Vue, Solid). The DX leader for content-first documentation.

Public evidence

moderate2026-03-20
Development velocity slowing

Last push 2026-02-07 (6 weeks ago), latest release Sep 2025. Compared to Fern (daily) or Swagger UI (weekly), cadence is slower.

GitHub API dataPublic data

Raw GitHub source

GitHub README peek

Constrained peek so you can sanity-check the source material without leaving the site.

<div align="center"> <img alt="Redoc logo" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Redocly/redoc/main//docs/images/redoc.png" width="400px" />

Generate beautiful API documentation from OpenAPI

</div>

About Redoc

Redoc is an open source tool for generating documentation from OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) definitions.

By default Redoc offers a three-panel, responsive layout:

  • The left panel contains a search bar and navigation menu.
  • The central panel contains the documentation.
  • The right panel contains request and response examples.

Redoc demo

Live demo

If you want to see how Redoc renders your OpenAPI definition, you can try it out online at https://redocly.github.io/redoc/.

A version of the Swagger Petstore API is displayed by default. To test it with your own OpenAPI definition, enter the URL for your definition and select TRY IT.

Redoc features

  • Responsive three-panel design with menu/scrolling synchronization
  • Support for OpenAPI 3.1, OpenAPI 3.0, and Swagger 2.0
  • Ability to integrate your API introduction into the side menu
  • High-level grouping in side menu with the x-tagGroups specification extension
  • Simple integration with create-react-app
  • Code samples support (with vendor extension) <br> code samples in action

Usage

Redoc is provided as a CLI tool (also distributed as a Docker image), HTML tag, and React component.

Generate documentation from the CLI

If you have Node installed, quickly generate documentation using npx:

npx @redocly/cli build-docs openapi.yaml

The tool outputs by default to a file named redoc-static.html that you can open in your browser.

Redocly CLI does more than docs; check it out and add linting, bundling, and more to your API workflow.

Add an HTML element to the page

Create an HTML page, or edit an existing one, and add the following within the body tags:

    <redoc spec-url="http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/swagger.json"></redoc>
    <script src="https://cdn.redoc.ly/redoc/latest/bundles/redoc.standalone.js"> </script>

Open the HTML file in your browser, and your API documentation is shown on the page.

Add your own spec-url to the <redoc> tag; this attribute can also be a local file. The JavaScript library can also be installed locally using npm and served from your own server, see the HTML deployment documentation for more details.

More usage options

Check out the deployment documentation for more options, and detailed documentation for each.

Redoc vs. Redocly API Reference

Redoc is Redocly's community-edition product. Looking for something more? We also offer hosted API reference documentation with additional features including:

  • Try-it console
  • Automated code samples
  • Pagination
  • Extra theme options
Documentation and resources
  • Reference docs - we take care of the hosting
  • Redoc - detailed documentation for this open source project (also in the docs/ folder)
  • Command-line interface to bundle your docs into a web-ready HTML file
  • API linting, bundling, and much more with open source Redocly CLI

Showcase

A sample of the organizations using Redocly tools in the wild:

  • Rebilly
  • Docker Engine
  • Zuora
  • Discourse
  • Commbox
  • APIs.guru
  • BoxKnight
  • Quaderno API

Pull requests to add your own API page to the list are welcome

Configuration

Redoc is highly configurable, see the configuration documentation for details.

OpenAPI specification extensions

Redoc uses the following specification extensions:

  • x-logo - is used to specify API logo
  • x-traitTag - useful for tags that refer to non-navigation properties like Pagination, Rate-Limits, etc
  • x-codeSamples - specify operation code samples
  • x-badges - specify operation badges
  • x-examples - specify JSON example for requests
  • x-nullable - mark schema param as a nullable
  • x-displayName - specify human-friendly names for the menu categories
  • x-tagGroups - group tags by categories in the side menu
  • x-servers - ability to specify different servers for API (backported from OpenAPI 3.0)
  • x-additionalPropertiesName - ability to supply a descriptive name for the additional property keys
  • x-summary - for Response object, use as the response button text, with description rendered under the button
  • x-explicitMappingOnly - in Schemas, display a more descriptive property name in objects with additionalProperties when viewing the property list with an object

Releases

The README for the 1.x version is on the v1.x branch.

All the 2.x releases are deployed to npm and can be used with Redocly-cdn:

  • particular release, for example, v2.0.0: https://cdn.redoc.ly/redoc/v2.0.0/bundles/redoc.standalone.js
  • latest release: https://cdn.redoc.ly/redoc/latest/bundles/redoc.standalone.js

Additionally, all the 1.x releases are hosted on our GitHub Pages-based CDN (deprecated):

  • particular release, for example v1.2.0: https://rebilly.github.io/ReDoc/releases/v1.2.0/redoc.min.js
  • v1.x.x release: https://rebilly.github.io/ReDoc/releases/v1.x.x/redoc.min.js
  • latest release: https://rebilly.github.io/ReDoc/releases/latest/redoc.min.js - points to latest 1.x.x release since 2.x releases are not hosted on this CDN but on unpkg.
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