Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Swagger UI VS StopLight

Compare Swagger UI VS StopLight and see what are their differences

Swagger UI logo Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation from a Swag

StopLight logo StopLight

Stoplight is an API Design, Development, and Documentation platform that enables consistency, reusability, and quality in your API lifecycle, all with an easy, enjoyable developer experience.
  • Swagger UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-17
  • StopLight Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-01

Stoplight is an API Design, Development, and Documentation platform.

Use Stoplight Platform to enable consistency, reusability, and quality in your API lifecycle, all with an easy, enjoyable developer experience.

Here's what you can do with Stoplight Platform:

  • Design API's with our easy visual designer, Stoplight Studio
  • Mock API designs automatically with Stoplight Prism mocking
  • Collaborate on your designs and invite internal and external users to provide feedback
  • Develop faster and better APIs
  • Test and enforce against style guides with Stoplight Spectral
  • Document both internal and external APIs automatically to create a delightful experience

Utilize and integrate design-first workflows to quickly scale up standardized, collaborative, and well-governed API programs.

Swagger UI

Website
swagger.io
Pricing URL
-
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

StopLight

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Web
Release Date
2015 August

Swagger UI features and specs

  • Interactive API Documentation
    Swagger UI provides a user-friendly interface where developers can interact with an API directly from the documentation, making it easier to understand and use.
  • Automated Documentation Generation
    Swagger UI can automatically generate API documentation from an OpenAPI Specification, reducing the time and effort required to write and maintain documentation manually.
  • Standardization
    It adheres to the OpenAPI Specification, a widely-accepted standard for defining APIs, which promotes consistency and interoperability across different tools and platforms.
  • Comprehensive Testing
    Developers can use the Swagger UI to test endpoints directly, allowing for quicker identification and resolution of issues during development.
  • Customization
    The UI can be customized to fit the specific needs and branding of a project, offering flexibility in how the API documentation is presented.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Swagger UI is part of a larger Swagger suite of tools, supported by a large community and numerous plugins, enhancing its capabilities and integration options.

Possible disadvantages of Swagger UI

  • Learning Curve
    New users may find Swagger UI complex and might require some time to get familiar with the OpenAPI Specification and the tool’s features.
  • Performance
    For very large APIs with numerous endpoints and complex schemas, Swagger UI can experience performance slowdowns, affecting usability.
  • Initial Setup
    Setting up Swagger UI and configuring the OpenAPI Specification can be time-consuming and requires accuracy to ensure the documentation is correctly generated.
  • Dependency on OpenAPI Specification
    The effectiveness of Swagger UI is highly dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the OpenAPI Specification. Poorly defined specifications can lead to incomplete or incorrect documentation.
  • Security Concerns
    Exposing APIs in an interactive documentation tool can raise security concerns, particularly if sensitive functions are publicly accessible without proper authentication and authorization controls.

StopLight features and specs

  • API
    Platform
  • Design Process
    API design
  • Documentation
    API documentation

Analysis of Swagger UI

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Swagger UI is generally considered a good tool for developing, sharing, and documenting RESTful APIs. Its ability to generate interactive documentation effortlessly is a significant advantage for developers looking to collaborate and streamline API consumption.

Why this product is good

  • Swagger UI is a widely used open-source tool that automatically generates interactive API documentation for RESTful web services. It is popular due to its ease of use, support for a wide range of programming languages, and its capability to visualize APIs directly from OpenAPI or Swagger definitions, which aids developers and teams in understanding and testing APIs effectively.

Recommended for

  • Developers seeking an easy way to document and interact with RESTful APIs.
  • Teams looking to enhance communication and understanding through visual API exploration.
  • Organizations aiming to adhere to best practices in API development and testing using the OpenAPI specification.

Analysis of StopLight

Overall verdict

  • Overall, StopLight is considered a strong choice for organizations looking to enhance their API development practices. Its user-friendly interface and extensive features make it a valuable asset for teams aiming to improve productivity and maintain high-quality API standards.

Why this product is good

  • StopLight (stoplight.io) is recognized for its comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline API design, documentation, testing, and debugging processes. It offers an intuitive interface, robust collaboration features, and powerful integrations that aid in efficiently managing the API lifecycle.

Recommended for

    StopLight is recommended for software development teams and organizations that prioritize API management and want tools to improve their workflow efficiency. It's particularly beneficial for teams that require collaboration across different stages of the API development lifecycle, including product managers, developers, and technical writers.

Swagger UI videos

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StopLight videos

StopLight GoLight Review | Toddler Clock | Teach Me Time | Zazu | Tot clock

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Swagger UI and StopLight)
API Tools
47 47%
53% 53
Developer Tools
57 57%
43% 43
APIs
39 39%
61% 61
Documentation
71 71%
29% 29

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Swagger UI and StopLight

Swagger UI Reviews

Top 20 Open Source & Cloud Free Postman Alternatives (2024 Updated)
Swagger UI is part of the Swagger ecosystem, providing tools for API design and documentation. It allows developers to visualize and interact with APIs effortlessly.
Source: medium.com
Postman Alternatives for API Testing and Monitoring
Swagger UI is a commonly used interactive visualization tool for RESTful web services, used for documenting, designing, and testing APIs. Swagger UI reads the OpenAPI specification document and generates an interactive documentation website. This web-based UI allows users to visualize and interact with the API’s resources without having any of the implementation logic in...
15 Best Postman Alternatives for Automated API Testing [2022 Updated]
One of the most appealing features is that Swagger UI is entirely customizable. You can freely modify your tool to meet your needs with complete access to the source code. Swagger UI makes an existing JSON or YAML document interactive. It creates a platform that organizes and categorizes our methods (get, put, post, delete).
Source: testsigma.com

StopLight Reviews

We have no reviews of StopLight yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Swagger UI should be more popular than StopLight. It has been mentiond 49 times since March 2021. 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.

Swagger UI mentions (49)

  • Common Mistakes in RESTful API Design
    The OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger) has become the industry standard for documenting RESTful APIs. Tools like Swagger UI and ReDoc can generate interactive documentation from OpenAPI definitions, reducing the effort to maintain quality documentation. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Leveraging API Documentation for Faster Developer Onboarding
    Reference generators like Swagger UI Automatically create API references from OpenAPI specifications, keeping documentation in sync with the actual API. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • How to Build a Task Manager API with Django REST Framework: Part 7 - API Documentation with OpenAPI and Swagger
    We’ll use OpenAPI (a standard for API specifications) and Swagger UI (a tool to visualize and interact with the API) to generate our documentation. The drf-spectacular library will help us create an OpenAPI schema for our DRF API and integrate Swagger UI seamlessly. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to get RCE with LaTeX via file upload
    Who has never analyzed a website and ended up causing an error and discovered that the server was in debug mode and therefore revealing environment variables (like other URLs, database connection strings and even credentials) and routes to API endpoints and their respective Swagger UI documentation? Cool, and who has ever come across something called "LaTeX Compiler API 1.0" among those endpoints? - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • The Good, the Bad, and the OpenAPI: Why Developers Love and Hate It
    Poor UI/UX – OpenAPI-generated documentation tools like Swagger UI are functional but often lack an intuitive experience. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

StopLight mentions (31)

  • Top 10 Best API Documentation Tools in 2025
    Review: Stoplight is an all-in-one API design and documentation platform that focuses on simplicity and collaboration. It offers visual tools for designing and documenting APIs, as well as interactive features for testing APIs. With Stoplight, teams can manage the entire lifecycle of their APIs, from design to documentation to testing. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • Creating an API style guide
    I was recently asked for my favorite resources and best practices for writing clear and structured API docs. I've developed my own style for writing API docs, but up until now I haven't published it. Although I've mainly worked with REST APIs, this guidance applies equally to GraphQL and any other APIs. But before I get to writing style, the most important requirement for good API docs is a good API. If you're... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • 7 Top API Documentation Software Tools 2025 (With Reviews and Pricing)✨
    For more information and to subscribe, visit Stoplight. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Show HN: FastOpenAPI – automated docs for many Python frameworks
    I'm honestly disappointed how OpenAPI keeps being used over and over as documentation, and extremely rarely as what it excels at, which is specification. We build all kinds of frameworks with routing and request/response validation, and then extract that into OpenAPI format, ofteng having to jump through hoops to adapt our internal data types and structures into those supported by JSON Schema. Instead, we could be... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Mastering API Definitions: A Comprehensive Guide
    Your development tools and integration needs also play a role. Choose a format that integrates well with your existing development tools such as SwaggerHub, Postman, or Stoplight. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Swagger UI and StopLight, you can also consider the following products

Postman - The Collaboration Platform for API Development

swagger.io - Swagger is an open source RESTapi Documentation Tool.

Hoppscotch - Open source API development ecosystem

Insomnia REST - Design, debug, test, and mock APIs locally, on Git, or cloud. Build better APIs collaboratively for the most popular protocols with a dev‑friendly UI, built-in automation, and an extensible plugin ecosystem.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform - Anypoint Platform is a unified, highly productive, hybrid integration platform that creates an application network of apps, data and devices with API-led connectivity.

EchoAPI - Next-gen API development collaboration platform. More than just API design, debug, test, load-testing, and mock.