Fern vs Swagger Codegen
Fern
buildwithfern.comSwagger Codegen
swagger.ioSide by side
| Figure | Fern | Swagger Codegen |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 2 |
| Spec score · API Generation Software | 9.0 (#1) | 8.3 (#3) |
| Spec score · Code Generators | 9.0 (#2) | 8.3 (#9) |
| Company | Fern identifies itself as Birch Solutions, Inc., a Postman company, and says it was born in Brooklyn, New York. | Swagger is presented as supported by SmartBear, which says it was founded in 2003 and lists its global headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts. |
| Rating on G2 | 5.0 out of 5 from 1 review. | 4.5 out of 5 from 190 reviews |
| Self-hosting | Fern lists self-hosting as an Enterprise capability for deploying on dedicated infrastructure. | The generator service can be deployed locally through a Docker image named swaggerapi/swagger-generator-v3. |
| Supported specifications | Fern Docs generates API references from OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, gRPC, and other specifications. | The repository lists version 3.0.71 as compatible with OpenAPI 3.0 and earlier listed versions, while version 2.4.46 supports through OpenAPI 2.0. |
| What it does | Fern turns API definitions and Markdown into hosted documentation sites, SDKs, and command-line tools. | Swagger Codegen generates API client libraries, server stubs and documentation from OpenAPI or Swagger definitions. |
Plans
In their own words
Swagger Codegen
Swagger Codegen is an open-source tool that generates API client libraries, server stubs and documentation from OpenAPI specifications. Its template-driven engine parses OpenAPI or Swagger definitions and produces project code from schemas. Swagger states that it can generate client SDKs in over 40 languages and server boilerplate in over 20. Listed capabilities include OpenAPI import, schema-to-code generation, project scaffolding, custom templates, an interactive API reference, code samples and a command-line interface. Outputs and integrations include HTML and Confluence Wiki documentation, Apache2 configuration files and JMeter. The project is available from GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license, with a hosted option through SwaggerHub. SwaggerHub can generate code in a selected language and push it to source-control repositories. Supported client targets include C#, Dart, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Swift and TypeScript variants. Server targets include ASP.NET Core, Go, Java Vert.x and JAX-RS options. The repository warns that untrusted descriptions may cause code injection.