Apiary vs pdoc

Apiary is a hosted web platform for designing, documenting, prototyping, and testing APIs. Its editor supports API Blueprint and OpenAPI (Swagger), with instant validation and a live preview as descriptions are written. Publishing a description creates a mock server that returns the responses specified in it; the default limit is 120 requests per minute, or 5,000 with authentication. Automated tests compare real API responses with expectations generated from the description. Apiary also supports OpenAPI import, interactive references, code samples, and API versioning. Teams can manage document access with Admin, Editor, and Viewer roles, and sync with GitHub. Branch-based GitHub integration is available on Pro. The free plan costs nothing and permits unlimited API projects and five participants per project, but projects are public and teams are not included. Standard and Pro are deprecated, with plan changes handled by support request for current customers. Embedding interactive documentation is supported on Standard and Pro.

pdoc generates API documentation from Python projects and organizes it around each project's module hierarchy. Its setup documentation says no configuration is needed to begin. The tool produces standalone HTML that can be exported to files, and a built-in web server refreshes the documentation when source files change. It supports Python type annotations and recognizes Markdown, numpydoc, and Google-style docstrings, with limited reStructuredText support. Developers can customize the generated HTML templates; search runs in the browser without third-party services. Deployment guidance covers GitHub Pages, and custom HTML fragments can be embedded in content management systems or static site generators. pdoc also offers a high-level interface and can be used as a Python library. It is free and open source, compatible with Python 3.10 and newer, and available for Linux, macOS, Windows, web, and self-hosted use. HTML is its only output format, and API documentation is its principal use case. Since pdoc imports or executes the Python modules while extracting docstrings, those modules are executed during documentation generation; Sphinx is recommended for substantially more complex documentation needs.