Apache APISIX vs Stoplight Elements

Apache APISIX is a free, Apache 2.0-licensed, self-hosted gateway for routing, securing and managing API, microservice and LLM traffic. It runs on bare metal or Kubernetes and supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, WebSocket, gRPC, MQTT, HTTP/3 and Dubbo, with HTTP-to-gRPC transcoding. More than 100 open-source plugins cover traffic management, security, observability and protocol handling. The project provides authentication options including API keys, JWT, Basic Authentication, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect, HMAC, LDAP, CAS, Keycloak, Casdoor, forward authentication and multi-auth, along with rate limiting and request transformation. Its NGINX-and-etcd architecture uses hot-reloadable plugins and distributes cluster configuration without restarts. AI gateway functions include multi-provider proxying, load balancing, retries, fallback, token limits, prompt security and transformation. Listed integrations include Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Redis, OpenAI, Anthropic and AWS Bedrock. Official source releases include detached signatures and SHA-512 checksums.

Stoplight Elements is a free, open-source set of embeddable web components for building interactive API documentation from OpenAPI documents. It adds customizable left navigation and a three-column layout, while an embedded console lets readers try requests and inspect responses within the documentation. Elements supports OpenAPI, including version 3.1, and JSON Schema. It provides code samples in Curl, Python, Ruby, and Java, and its Stoplight-flavored Markdown supports tabs, callouts, and embedded JSON examples. The components require no build steps and can be used with any framework or HTML project. Documentation can be hosted anywhere, including S3 or GitHub. Elements can point to an OpenAPI document or a Stoplight Workspace and can work with any OpenAPI editor. The listed plan costs nothing and includes OpenAPI 3.1 support, an interactive API console, embedding into an existing CMS, and hosting anywhere. Compared with Elements DevPortal, the product page does not list multiple API listings, mocking, Markdown articles, branch version selection, or search. Stoplight identifies SmartBear as its parent company.