Kreya vs protoc-gen-doc

Kreya is a desktop API client for exploring, testing, and automating API workflows on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It works with gRPC, REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events, and can watch or import OpenAPI specifications, GraphQL schemas, and protobufs. Testing options include scripted checks and snapshot tests; its headless CLI can run in CI/CD and generate JUnit reports. Projects are kept in structured JSON intended to support Git diffs, reviews, and versioning. Kreya can import Postman and Insomnia collections, plus HAR, cURL, gRPCurl, and grpc web curl data. A reusable authentication vault covers OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Basic, API keys, mTLS, AWS SigV4, Kerberos, NTLM, and JWT Profile. The maker says app data stays on the device, while its privacy policy says the app and CLI collect anonymized telemetry. There is a free plan; Pro is $5 a month. Secret manager integration is marked as coming soon.

protoc-gen-doc is a documentation generator plugin for the Google Protocol Buffers compiler. It turns comments in .proto files into HTML, JSON, DocBook, or Markdown documentation, covering files, messages, fields, services and methods, enums and values, and extensions. It supports proto2 and proto3, including both in the same context. You can exclude files with path patterns and omit comments marked with the @exclude prefix. The plugin runs through protoc with the --doc_out and --doc_opt options; its source_relative flag places generated output in the same relative directory as the input. For customization, users can supply a Go template or use a stylesheet.css file to change HTML appearance. Installation options include Go, prebuilt releases, a Docker image, and a Maven Central package. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and is self-hosted. The project is free under the MIT License, which allows use, modification, distribution, sublicensing, and sale under its terms. The license provides the software as is, without warranty.