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18 Comments

What tools do you use to build Internal docs?

Trying to find some good tools for building internal docs i.e. Pages documenting how to use an API maintained by a sub-team or pages teaching new hires part of your stack.

posted to Icon for group Developers
Developers
on December 17, 2020
  1. 3

    I've always used Confluence though I've always found the experience a bit sluggish and non-enjoyable. I've always been looking for other solutions on the side but...without much success.

    One product I've been watching particularly is: https://readme.com

  2. 2

    You can look at SendMan’s docs at https://docs.sendman.io. We use:

    1. mkdocs-marerial for freeform textual markdown documentation.
    2. redoc for API docs based on OpenAPI (formerly swagger) documentation.

    I personally don’t like Confluence - and would recommend Notion for internal knowledge bases. If you maintain your internal docs as you would your external ones - it can lead to higher standards (at obviously higher costs).

  3. 1

    We've used Confluence and Notion for the 2nd part of the question (examples like pages teaching new hires about parts of the stack).

    I think Confluence is a little more difficult to use. For the most part the only people that contributed to the Confluence pages were people that were required to as part of their job (at our company the project managers). We never saw broader usage with other team members.

    At my new job we went with Notion we've gotten broader usage around the team.

    For API documentation something like OpenAPI / Swagger I think is a much better option, especially if you can integrate it in a way where it autobuilds with your code as long as it is commented correctly. The auto-generating can be very effective and once other teams start relying on those docs, it gets easier to ensure engineers make sure they get added.

    Also the fact that you can test API queries directly in the docs and see the results is better than a transcribed version in Confluence or Notion (that will also drift out of date over time).

  4. 1

    Definitely suggest using Confluence for this

  5. 1

    We use Slab.com for our sales/marketing/custom success/finance/admin team, and Phabricator Wiki for our development team.

  6. 1

    Probably it's not what you need, but I recently used Docusaurus v2 for a public docs site. The experience was very smooth and straightforward.

    https://docusaurus.io

  7. 1

    Github.

    Running joke - startups that are 'Github for X'. Why not just use Github?

    We just create files, format them using markdown, everyone can see it. Boom.

    If you're marketing guys don't know how to use Github, show them:

  8. 1

    Lots of Confluence users in here... does it have any advantages over Notion for internal docs?

  9. 1

    Markdown files or Google docs, I hate Confluence

  10. 1

    Confluence is a really good platform. I find it very useful for day to day documentation too!

  11. 1

    I have try Docusaurus, and I like it 🙂

  12. 1

    honestly, i've used notion...

    ... but most of our wiki is in github's wiki system. simple, we're all there anyways.

    1. 1

      Thanks for response!
      Looks quite broad i.e. used for sales pages as well. Do you find it holistic for engineering purposes too? Im thinking sharing code snippets, linking to code in repo, display widgets for things such as test status (passing or not) and general integration with third party tools?
      thanks

      1. 1

        I've used it in engineering teams, actually :) So the answer is yes for engineering purposes. I've not integrated with third-party tools, so I'd recommend looking at their docs for more info: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/resources/

  13. 3

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