Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

GraphQL Playground VS Docusaurus

Compare GraphQL Playground VS Docusaurus and see what are their differences

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GraphQL Playground logo GraphQL Playground

GraphQL IDE for better development workflows

Docusaurus logo Docusaurus

Easy to maintain open source documentation websites
  • GraphQL Playground Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • Docusaurus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-22

GraphQL Playground features and specs

  • Interactive Interface
    GraphQL Playground provides a user-friendly, interactive interface for exploring and testing GraphQL queries and mutations. This allows developers to quickly experiment with their GraphQL API.
  • Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting
    It offers auto-completion and syntax highlighting which increases productivity by helping developers write correct GraphQL queries faster.
  • Built-in Documentation
    The built-in documentation explorer helps developers easily navigate and understand the GraphQL schemas, types, and fields available in their API.
  • Real-time Error Feedback
    Provides real-time error feedback, making it easier to identify and fix issues while writing queries, resulting in smoother development workflows.
  • Request History
    GraphQL Playground maintains a history of queries and mutations executed, allowing developers to quickly revisit and reuse previous work.
  • Customizable Settings
    It is highly customizable, allowing developers to set endpoint URLs, headers, and other configurations to match various environments (development, staging, production).

Possible disadvantages of GraphQL Playground

  • Performance
    GraphQL Playground can be resource-intensive, consuming significant amounts of memory and CPU, which might slow down the development environment, especially with large schemas.
  • Security Concerns
    As an interactive playground embedded in web interfaces, it may expose sensitive data or operations if not properly secured, necessitating careful configuration and access control.
  • Limited Offline Use
    Since it relies on an active endpoint to fetch schema details and execute queries, its utility is limited when working offline.
  • Deprecated Maintenance
    As of 2020, the GraphQL Playground repository is not actively maintained anymore, which means it may not receive updates, bug fixes, or new features.
  • Complex Configuration
    In comparison to simpler alternatives, setting up and configuring GraphQL Playground can be more complex and time-consuming.

Docusaurus features and specs

  • Easy Setup
    Docusaurus offers an easy and quick setup process, making it accessible for users to get started quickly. It provides a template to kickstart documentation projects efficiently.
  • Customizable
    It is highly customizable with options to add custom themes, plugins, and translations, allowing users to tailor their documentation to specific needs and visual styles.
  • React-Based
    Built on React, it enables developers familiar with React to seamlessly create documentation components and extend functionalities using React's ecosystem.
  • Versioning
    Docusaurus supports documentation versioning, making it easier to maintain and access historical versions of documentation for different releases of a project.
  • Extensive Plugin Ecosystem
    Offers a wide array of plugins to enhance functionalities, such as search capabilities, SEO, and integrations with other tools and services.
  • Good Performance
    Optimized for performance, providing fast load times and a smooth user experience for accessing documentation.
  • Active Community
    Docusaurus has an active and supportive community that contributes plugins, themes, and offers help, making it easier to find solutions to common problems.

Possible disadvantages of Docusaurus

  • Steep Learning Curve for Non-React Developers
    Developers not familiar with React may find it challenging to customize or extend Docusaurus documentation due to the React-based nature of the tool.
  • Limited Out-of-the-Box Features
    While highly customizable, the basic setup can feel limited, and users often need to add plugins and custom code to meet their specific requirements.
  • Dependency Management
    Being React-based, it comes with Node.js and NPM dependencies, which may add some overhead for managing and updating dependencies.
  • Static Site Limitations
    As a static site generator, it may be less suitable for dynamic content that requires frequent real-time updates or complex backend integrations.
  • Complex Configuration
    For projects requiring extensive customization, the configuration can become complex and harder to manage, potentially requiring more effort and expertise.

Analysis of GraphQL Playground

Overall verdict

  • Yes, GraphQL Playground is considered a good tool, especially for its user-friendly features and robust functionality. It significantly enhances the API development experience, particularly when dealing with GraphQL.

Why this product is good

  • GraphQL Playground is a popular tool for testing and exploring GraphQL APIs. It offers an intuitive interface, enabling developers to write GraphQL queries, inspect responses, and debug their GraphQL operations with ease. The tool supports multiple environments and provides features like query history, documentation exploration, and real-time subscriptions, making it a versatile choice for both beginner and advanced users.

Recommended for

    GraphQL Playground is recommended for developers and software engineers who are working with GraphQL APIs. It is particularly useful for those who need to test and debug APIs, create and manage queries efficiently, or just learn more about how a GraphQL API works. It's suitable for both individual developers and teams looking to streamline their API development workflows.

Analysis of Docusaurus

Overall verdict

  • Docusaurus is generally considered a good choice for creating documentation websites, especially for open source projects. Its structured approach, alongside its powerful customization options, makes it suitable for both small and large scale documentation needs.

Why this product is good

  • Docusaurus is a popular open-source project developed by Facebook for creating, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites with ease. It is praised for its simplicity, flexibility, and rich feature set, including built-in support for versioning, localization, search, and theming. It is built on React, which allows developers to extend and customize their documentation site extensively.

Recommended for

    Docusaurus is recommended for developers and project maintainers who need to create and manage comprehensive documentation for open source projects or internal tools. It is particularly valuable for those who prefer a React-based approach and need features like versioning and localization out of the box.

GraphQL Playground videos

Graphql playground review completa parte 1

More videos:

  • Review - Create Local GraphQL Playground
  • Review - Graphql playground review completa parte 2

Docusaurus videos

F8 2019: Using Docusaurus to Create Open Source Websites

More videos:

  • Review - Build and deploy Docusaurus
  • Review - Docusaurus - Docs dan Blog Final

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GraphQL Playground and Docusaurus)
Developer Tools
38 38%
62% 62
Documentation
0 0%
100% 100
GraphQL
100 100%
0% 0
Documentation As A Service & Tools

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare GraphQL Playground and Docusaurus

GraphQL Playground Reviews

We have no reviews of GraphQL Playground yet.
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Docusaurus Reviews

Best Gitbook Alternatives You Need to Try in 2023
In conclusion, there are several alternatives to Gitbook that are available out there. Each one has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and the best choice will depend on your specific needs and project requirements. Consider giving Archbee, Notion, Bookstack, and Docusaurus a try to see which works best for you. Remember, you can choose the right tool to get your...
Source: www.archbee.com
Best 25 Software Documentation Tools 2023
Docusaurus is an open-source documentation tool specifically designed for creating documentation for software projects, with a focus on documentation websites and easy integration with version control systems.
Source: www.uphint.com
19 Best Online Documentation Software & Tools for 2023
Docusaurus is an open-source online documentation tool that is powered by MDX. You can maintain different versions of your documentation so that it is in sync with your project’s stages. You can also translate your docs into a language your end-users prefer by using tools like Git and Crowdin. Furthermore, with Docusaurus, you don’t have to worry about the design and...
10 static site generators to watch in 2021
Built using React, it supports writing content in MDX so that JSX and React components can be embedded into markdown, but also aims to remain easy to learn and use by providing sensible defaults and the ability to override if the developer has need. Recently releasing a major update with Docusaurus 2 beta, many of its principles were inspired by Gatsby but it is more focused...
Source: www.netlify.com
20 Best Web Project Documentation Tools
Save time and focus on your project’s documentation. Simply write docs and blog posts with Markdown and Docusaurus will publish a set of static html files ready to serve.
Source: bashooka.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Docusaurus seems to be a lot more popular than GraphQL Playground. While we know about 213 links to Docusaurus, we've tracked only 12 mentions of GraphQL Playground. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

GraphQL Playground mentions (12)

  • Show HN: API Parrot – Automatically Reverse Engineer HTTP APIs"
    Have you tried something like GraphQL playground before? https://github.com/graphql/graphql-playground There's other tools out there that can generate similar docs or playgrounds, given you have a schema/spec of some type. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Exploring GraphiQL 2 Updates and New Features
    GraphiQL is a tool that was created to help developers explore GraphQL APIs, maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. But when GraphiQL became more and more popular, developers started to create additional GraphQL IDEs. A good example of this was GraphQL Playground, which quickly became the most popular GraphQL IDE. It was loosely based on GraphiQL, but had more features and a better UI. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Why Is It So Important To Go To Meetups
    I went to a GraphQL meetup and they used the gql playground and a similar schema generator to what I was using, and it made me feel relevant. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • GraphQL subscriptions at scale with NATS
    Here, we'll create a simple GraphQL server and subscribe to a subject from our resolver. We'll use GraphQL playground to mock client side behavior. Once we're connected we'll use NATS CLI to send a payload to our subject and see the changes on the client. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • GraphQL vs REST in .NET Core
    Now we can consume created GraphQL API. In the GitHub Repo same functionality has been added with REST approach and GraphQL endpoint. Also widely used Swagger configured for Web API Endpoints as well as AltairUI added for GraphQL endpoint testing. Naturally, AltairUI it not a must for GraphQL, you can also use Swagger, GraphiQL, or GraphQL Playground. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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Docusaurus mentions (213)

  • Create fast, modern API docs using Docusaurus
    Docusaurus is a powerful static site generator built by Meta and designed specifically for documentation websites. It’s React-based, which means you get a lot of flexibility in how you customize your site, and it comes with features that make API documentation much easier to manage:. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • How we built our docs site
    We looked into a few different providers including GitBook, Docusaurus, Hashnode, Fern and Mintlify. There were various factors in the decision but the TLDR is that while we manage our SDKs with Fern, we chose Mintlify for docs as it had the best writing experience, supported custom React components, and was more affordable for hosting on a custom domain. Both Fern and Mintlify pull from the same single source of... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to Migrate Technical Documentation: Tools, Checklist, and Tips
    Docusaurus is an open-source documentation site generator built by Meta, designed for creating optimized, fast, and customizable websites using React. It supports markdown files, versioning, internationalization (i18n), and integrates well with Git-based workflows. Its React architecture allows for deep customization and dynamic components. Docusaurus is ideal for developer-focused documentation with a need for... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Ask HN: Static Site (not blog) Generator?
    I think this is more a question of how you want to create and store your content and templates, like whether they exist as a bunch of Markdown files, database entries, a third-party API, etc. They're typically made to work in some sort of toolchain or ecosystem. For example, if you're working in the React world, Next.js can actually output static HTML pages that work fine without JS... Just use the pages router... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Deploying a static Website with Pulumi
    For this challenge, I've built a simple static website based on Docusaurus for tutorials and blog posts. As I'm not too seasoned with Frontend development, I only made small changes to the template, and added some very simple blog posts and tutorials there. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing GraphQL Playground and Docusaurus, you can also consider the following products

Stellate.co - Everything you need to run your GraphQL API at scale

GitBook - Modern Publishing, Simply taking your books from ideas to finished, polished books.

How to GraphQL - Open-source tutorial website to learn GraphQL development

Doxygen - Generate documentation from source code

GraphQl Editor - Editor for GraphQL that lets you draw GraphQL schemas using visual nodes

MkDocs - Project documentation with Markdown.