Doxygen vs Fern
Doxygen
doxygen.nlFern
buildwithfern.comSide by side
| Figure | Doxygen | Fern |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · API Documentation Tools | 8.0 (#9) | 8.9 (#1) |
| Spec score · Technical Writing Platforms | 7.9 (#18) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Compliance | Doxygen's privacy policy describes handling of website data under the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. | Fern's trust center lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA, with a SOC 2 report and penetration-test summary available by request. |
| Support | Users are directed to Stack Overflow and the doxygen users mailing list, while commercial feature or bug-fix support has limited capacity. | The Enterprise plan includes dedicated support and an uptime SLA. |
Plans
In their own words
Doxygen
Doxygen is a free documentation generator that turns source-code comments into reference material, parsing items such as classes, functions and variables. It supports C/C++, Lex, Java, Python, VHDL, PHP IDL, C#, Fortran, Objective-C 2.0 and some D sources. Output can be generated as HTML, PDF through LaTeX, Word through RTF or structured XML for external tools. Graphviz’s dot tool can add include-dependency, collaboration, call, directory-structure and class-hierarchy diagrams. Doxywizard provides a graphical interface for editing settings and running the generator on Windows, Linux and macOS; Doxygen also works on many Unix flavors. It supports HTML Help, docsets, Qt-Help and Eclipse Help, with more than 100 configurable options. The tool runs without registration and does not collect personal or usage data. It is self-hosted and licensed under the GNU General Public License, without express or implied warranty. Help is listed through Stack Overflow and the doxygen users mailing list; commercial feature and bug-fix support has limited capacity.