Docusaurus

Docusaurus turns a folder of Markdown into a full documentation site: versioned docs, a blog, search, translations and a sidebar built from your files, all output as static HTML you can host anywhere. Meta built it for its own open source projects, and it runs the React Native and Jest sites. MIT licensed and completely free.

npm init docusaurus@latest gets you a working site, and Vercel, Netlify or GitHub Pages will host it. Pages are MDX, so you can drop React components straight into the docs. Search is Algolia DocSearch, free for developer docs, or a community local-search plugin if you'd rather skip Algolia. Builds used to be slow; the Rspack-based Docusaurus Faster work in 3.6 made them two to four times quicker. No paid tier exists: solo devs through large teams pay only for hosting.

The catch: it's a React app wearing a docs costume. Customizing past the theme means writing React, and there's no web editor, so non-technical writers either learn Git or you move to a hosted platform like Mintlify or GitBook. Version 4 is in canary with breaking changes and a Node 24 floor, so budget an upgrade. Simple sites fit VitePress or MkDocs better.