GitBook vs Jupyter Book

GitBook is a documentation platform for teams creating, reviewing, and publishing branded documentation websites. Content can be written in a block-based visual editor or Markdown, organized through branch-based review, or synchronized with GitHub and GitLab. Published sites support custom domains, responsive layouts, SEO, preview deployments, and site variants. GitBook Agent can surface documentation gaps, draft updates, and review changes, while GitBook Assistant answers questions using documentation and connected sources. Teams can set tiered permissions and restrict documentation to authenticated users. The Free plan is free, includes one user, and limits GitBook Agent to 10 messages per week. Premium is $65 a month billed per site annually, plus $12 per user/month; Ultimate is $249 a month billed per site annually, plus $12 per user/month. Annual billing includes two months free, and a 14-day trial is available. Published documentation traffic is not limited.

Jupyter Book is an open-source tool for publishing reusable, reproducible computational narratives. Authors can build websites, PDFs, and other formats using MyST Markdown and Jupyter notebooks, with cross-references, citations, figures, tables, equations, and executable code blocks. Code may run during a build to produce computed figures, tables, and values, although execution is off by default. Pages can include interactive widgets, browser execution through a remote kernel, or launch buttons for Binder and JupyterHub. Deployment options include GitHub Pages, ReadTheDocs, Netlify, Vercel, CurveNote, GitLab Pages, and custom hosting. Plugins can add directives, roles, and content transforms. Installation is available through PyPI, conda-forge, and npm, with several package-manager routes. Jupyter Book 2 uses the MyST Document Engine; version 1 is mostly in maintenance mode. The free plan costs nothing.