How does Next Docs UI different from other existing frameworks? It is a frequently asked question and here's an answer.

Is it a Nextra Clone?

Someone asked me this question on Discord, it is a fact that it's highly inspired by Nextra. For example, the Routing Conventions. That is why meta.json also exists in Next Docs if you're using Contentlayer.

However, Next Docs is not a clone of Nextra. While we both support a lot of advanced usages, Nextra is more opinionated but Next Docs isn't. It is built for App Router. As a result, It provides many server-side functions and you have to configure things manually compared by simply editing a configuration file.

Next Docs UI works great if you want more control over everything, such as adding it to an existing codebase or implementing advanced routing.

The Core Model

Next Docs also rely on other libraries, the model of Next Docs is a backend library + frontend framework, it accepts different sources and gives you a great looking, constant UI.

The only reasion I build Next Docs is that I used to look for an alternative to Nextra that allows me to fully customise the UI. I came up with Next Docs Zeta, a headless ui library. Next Docs UI laterly released as an example of Next Docs Zeta, built on top of Zeta.

A Table

Docusaurus

Docusaurus is a powerful framework based on React.js. It offers many cool features via plugins and custom themes.

Better DX

Since Next Docs is built on the top of Next.js, you'll have to start Next.js dev server in order to review changes. And boilerbate code is relatively more compared to Docusaurus. For a simple docs, Docusaurus might be a better choice if you don't need any Next.js specific functionality.

Plugins

You can easily achieve many things that will take you a few hours to setup manually with plugins. Although the flexiblity of Next Docs is high, their eco-system is larger and maintained by many contributors.

When to use Next Docs?

For most of the web applications, vanilla React.js is no longer enough. Nowadays, we also wish to have a blog, a showcase page, a FAQ page, etc. With a fancy UI that's breathtaking, in these cases, Next Docs can help you build the docs easier, with less boilerbate.

We are working forward

More and more advanced features will be rolling out. We currently support multiple searching solutions including Algolia Search. A good UI and user experience is always our priority, welcome to give us some advices via Github discussions.