Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ShowdownJS VS Markdown-it

Compare ShowdownJS VS Markdown-it and see what are their differences

ShowdownJS logo ShowdownJS

A Markdown to HTML converter written in JavaScript

Markdown-it logo Markdown-it

High-speed Markdown parser with 100% CommonMark support, extensions & syntax plugins.
  • ShowdownJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Markdown-it Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-07-21

ShowdownJS features and specs

  • Open Source
    ShowdownJS is open source and freely available under the MIT license, allowing for modification and distribution.
  • Wide Compatibility
    It can be used in both the browser and server-side environments, making it versatile for various projects.
  • Active Community
    The project has an active community and regular updates, which contribute to stability and ongoing support.
  • Extensive Documentation
    ShowdownJS provides comprehensive documentation, making it easier for developers to understand and implement.
  • Customizable
    It offers a wide range of extensions and options, allowing users to customize the behavior to suit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of ShowdownJS

  • Performance
    For very large documents, performance may not be as high compared to some other specialized Markdown parsers.
  • Learning Curve
    Although documentation is available, new users might need some time to fully understand how to leverage all features.
  • Dependency Management
    In projects where minimizing dependencies is important, adding another library might be a concern.
  • Feature Parity
    While ShowdownJS supports many Markdown features, some advanced or niche features might not be covered.

Markdown-it features and specs

  • High Performance
    Markdown-it is designed for fast processing, making it suitable for applications where performance is crucial.
  • Extensibility
    Markdown-it offers a plugin system that allows developers to extend its core functionality with custom rules and plugins.
  • CommonMark Support
    Markdown-it fully supports the CommonMark specification, ensuring consistent rendering across different platforms.
  • Full-featured
    It includes a lot of built-in features like support for tables, footnotes, and more advanced Markdown formatting options.
  • Easy to Customize
    With a wide range of configurations, developers can easily customize the parser to fit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Markdown-it

  • Size
    Being feature-rich and extensible may result in a larger library size, which might not be ideal for all projects, especially those with strict size limitations.
  • Complexity
    For users who need a simple markdown parser, Markdown-it’s extensive features and configuration options might be overwhelming.
  • Learning Curve
    Utilizing its full potential requires learning and understanding its plugin architecture and customization options, which could be challenging for beginners.
  • External Dependencies
    Relying on plugins may introduce external dependencies that need to be managed and maintained.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ShowdownJS and Markdown-it)
Competitive Intelligence
50 50%
50% 50
SEO
52 52%
48% 48
Data Profiling
56 56%
44% 44
Resource Profiling And Monitoring

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

ShowdownJS might be a bit more popular than Markdown-it. We know about 9 links to it since March 2021 and only 8 links to Markdown-it. 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.

ShowdownJS mentions (9)

  • How do I display a markdown table on a website with go backend?
    So you're going to need a Markdown parser that produces HTML. But there's a question of where is the data coming from and where you you want to process it? If it's going to be all on the frontend like a text editor, use a JS library for it (a quick google search produces ShowdownJS). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Docusaurus first impression and stealing like an open sourcer
    Previously, I was required to implement the markdown support manually which meant that the use of public libraries was prohibited. My tool could only support limited styling elements such as header1, header2, links, bold and italics, but now I can finally let my tool have a full markdown support by using Showdown. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • I made a full-stack portfolio site using Next.js and Tailwind!
    The first two ages are very heavy on content so I decided to use markdown and tailwind’s typography plugin for styling. I also used showdown to fetch the markdown and turn it into HTML. The code for the above can be found on the site’s GitHub repository. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Working on a no-code data notebook. You can quickly pull data from platforms like Stripe and do complex analysis without writing SQL, all within a Notion-style interface. Thoughts?
    I'm using https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown for the core rendering-markdown functionality, with a bunch of additional listeners etc on top of it to fit it into the notion-style UX! Hope that helps :). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Markdown-Tag: Add Markdown to any HTML using a <md> tag
    It looks like it uses showdown as the engine. Source: almost 3 years ago
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Markdown-it mentions (8)

  • Building PicoSSG: 'Just Enough Code'
    ADR-003 documented the choice of markdown-it over alternatives like marked, based on careful evaluation of edge cases and built-in features like URL linking. - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • 6 free Markdown (.md) WYSIWYG desktop Editors – Part1
    [5] markdown-it demo Https://markdown-it.github.io/. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Rendering Markdown with Enhance
    Enhance does not natively support rendering markdown into HTML, which is out of scope for the project. Instead, we rely on markdown-it, an excellent JavaScript markdown parser that is endlessly configurable with plugins. As we use markdown in many different projects, we’ve created a node module called, Arcdown, which packages together our preferred conventions for parsing markdown files. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • I struggled to get markdown highlighting to work: Here’s the working code snippet 🚀
    It looks like this is TypeScript using markdown-it? Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Adding Markdown Support to a Static Site Generator
    For my own static site generator, Jellybean, one feature of Docusaurus that I wanted to implement was full markdown support. This is because my static site generator previously only had partial markdown support, which is not very user-friendly. Thankfully, there are a some great open-source libraries which can provide full markdown support and I decided to use markdown-it for my project. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing ShowdownJS and Markdown-it, you can also consider the following products

Marked.js - A full-featured markdown parser and compiler, written in JavaScript. Built for speed.

Snarkdown - The super fast, 1kb Markdown parser in JavaScript

Markdeep - Advanced Markdown renderer for the browser with full diagram support

Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents in the browser.

Landslide - landslide - Generate HTML5 slideshows from markdown, ReST, or textile.

Skuuudle - Discover, match and monitor your eCommerce competitors.