What Is GitBook?

GitBook is a collaborative documentation tool that allows anyone to document anything—such as products and APIs—and share knowledge through a user-friendly online platform. According to GitBook, “GitBook is a flexible platform for all kinds of content and collaboration.” It provides a single unified workspace for different users to create, manage and share content without using multiple tools. For example:

• Individuals can use GitBook to track their personal projects, add notes or ideas.
• Teams can centralize and share their internal knowledge bases on GitBook, which improves collaboration and makes finding information more convenient.
• Organizations, including Arctype, can create beautiful docs to guide and support their users and contributors.

Why Is GitBook the Best Documentation Solution?

Given that digital documentation solutions have been around since the dawn of the digital age, it is entirely fair to ask, “why does the world need another documentation tool?”—or in other words, “why should anyone use GitBook?” Of course, other good solutions can be utilized to build user and developer documentation, such as ReadTheDocs, MKDocs, and Docsify. These popular tools share some features with GitBook, including supporting custom domains, PDF export, search, and navigation abilities. However, GitBook outperforms these documentation solutions in many aspects, including but not limited to:

• Superior customization capabilities to reflect any brand’s identity
• Great plugin system­ with almost 700 plugins that extend the default GitBook functionally
• The most convenient GitHub integration you’ll find to easily sync your documentation with GitHub and keep everything up-to-date!‌

Therefore, in a scenario where requirements like advanced branding, customizable UI design, and features extensibility are essential, existing alternatives cannot compete with GitBook.

As a more concrete example, Intermine had some specific requirements for my documentation overhaul project, which included search and customization abilities, as well as markdown support. Similar to the scenario described above, I started comparing several options and ultimately chose Gitbook to create the new user training material because it:

• Comes standard with both a great online WYSIWYG editor and markdown support
• Allows for team collaboration
• Can be customized to match any organization’s branding
• Offers a base version that is entirely free for personal use, and the paid, premium version can also be licensed to open-source projects free of charge
• Can display your content, publicly or privately, with anyone—including non-GitBook users.
• It can be configured to synchronize your content with GitHub and also create PDF versions of your documentation.
• It supports integration with other tools, such as Slack, Intercom, and Google Analytics.