Docusaurus alternatives in 2026, and why Rspress is our pick

Last updated: September 2026. Prices checked on each vendor's pricing page on 10 September 2026.

Most lists of Docusaurus alternatives were written when Docusaurus still bundled with webpack, so they all make the same case: it's slow, move to something faster. That case is out of date. Docusaurus 3.10 builds with Rspack, the same Rust bundler that sits underneath Rspress.

So we tested it. Same 500 pages, both tools, one machine. The production builds finished within five seconds of each other.

Rspress is still what we run our own docs on, and it's still our pick for most React teams. The reason is just different from the one you'll read elsewhere.

The short answer

• Rspress if your team writes React and you want docs that AI coding agents can read with no extra work.
• Starlight if the docs need Arabic, or your writers would rather never touch React.
• Stay on Docusaurus if you have hundreds of versioned pages and plugins you depend on. Moving will cost more than it saves.
• Mintlify if you sell an API, want hosting and an API playground handled, and $450 a month doesn't hurt.
• GitBook if the people writing the docs aren't developers.
• Not MkDocs for anything new, and not Docsify for anything public.

The rest of this post is the evidence for each line.

What we measured

We generated 500 Markdown pages, each with a table, two code blocks and six sections, and dropped the same set into a fresh Rspress 2.0.21 project and a fresh Docusaurus 3.10.2 project. Both used their default templates. The Docusaurus template now ships with its v4 future flag switched on, which turns on the Rspack bundler, so this is Rspack against Rspack.

The machine was a small Linux cloud box: 2 vCPUs, 7 GB of RAM, Node 22. "No cache" means we deleted every build cache first.

The production build is a draw. Nobody should switch tools over five seconds in CI.

The dev server is a different story. Rspress turns on lazy compilation by default, so it only compiles the page you actually open. Docusaurus compiles the site before it serves anything, which means its number grows every time you add pages. On a laptop with a big docs repo, that's the difference between checking an edit straight away and wandering off to read Slack.

Two caveats. The Docusaurus template includes a sample blog, so it produced 528 HTML files to Rspress's 511. And this is one machine and one content shape, so read it as a direction, not a benchmark suite.

Why Rspress is our pick

Our internal CRM's developer handbook runs on Rspress: twelve pages covering the stack, the data model, the money rules and a gotchas list. My own open-source website audit tool, Safi Studio Scanner, has its docs on Rspress 2 too. Here's what keeps us on it.

llms.txt is one line. Rspress 2.0, released in January 2026, added what it calls SSG-MD: it renders every page to Markdown as well as HTML, then writes an llms.txt index and an llms-full.txt bundle.

// rspress.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from '@rspress/core';

export default defineConfig({
  root: 'docs',
  title: 'Product docs',
  llms: true,
});

On our 500-page test that line added a 90 KB llms.txt, a 1.06 MB llms-full.txt, and a .md copy of every page at the same path. It renders from the React output, so a component inside your MDX comes out as its text, not as raw JSX that confuses a model. We've argued that llms.txt is mostly decoration for a normal business website, but docs are the exception: developers really do point Claude Code and Cursor at them. The feature is still tagged experimental, so check the output before you rely on it.

The defaults are the right defaults. Full-text search works with no setup (it uses FlexSearch; Algolia is an optional plugin). Code highlighting runs through Shiki at build time, so the browser downloads no highlighter. Dead link checking is on, which means the build fails when a page links to something that doesn't exist. For a twelve-page handbook where every page points at three others, that check is worth more than any theme.

Versioned docs are a config block. You list your versions under multiVersion, put each in its own folder, and search stays scoped to the version the reader is on.

Customising doesn't mean forking the theme. You can go from CSS variables, to overriding BEM class names, to swapping a component, to running rspress eject on one component and owning it. Most teams stop at step one.

It even ships skills for AI agents. npm create rspress@latest offers --skill rspress-docs-generator and a few others, so an agent working in the repo knows how the project is laid out.

Where Rspress falls short

There is no right-to-left support. The locales setting takes a language code, a label, a title and a description. Nothing for direction. We searched the 2.0.21 source and the default theme has no RTL styles either. If your docs need an Arabic version, you'd be writing that CSS yourself. For a lot of GCC products, that settles it in Starlight's favour.

The community is small. Rspress has about 2,300 GitHub stars. Docusaurus has over 66,000. That gap shows up as fewer plugins, fewer answered questions, and more afternoons reading source code.

2.0 broke things. The Rust MDX parser was dropped, the separate packages were merged into @rspress/core, and the theme was redesigned. A 1.x site needs real upgrade work.

Starlight: the pick when docs need Arabic

Starlight is the docs theme for Astro. It sends plain HTML with very little JavaScript, ships Pagefind search, and switches a locale to right-to-left with one setting:

// astro.config.mjs, inside starlight({ ... })
locales: {
  en: { label: 'English' },
  ar: { label: 'العربية', dir: 'rtl' },
},

Two things to know. It's at version 0.42.0 (2 September 2026), still before 1.0, and breaking changes land in minor versions: 0.41 dropped support for Astro 6. And Cloudflare bought the team behind Astro in January 2026, promising it stays open source. That's the same move Cloudflare made with VoidZero, the company behind Vite, in June. Neither is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to know who pays for the tools under your docs.

Some comparisons say moving to Starlight means rebuilding your React components in Astro. Not quite. Astro renders React components through its React integration. What you rebuild is anything that overrode the Docusaurus theme. For llms.txt you'd add the community starlight-llms-txt plugin.

Mintlify and GitBook: check the prices again

The figures in most of these roundups are old. Mintlify isn't "around $150 a month", and GitBook isn't "$6.70 per user".

Mintlify has a free Starter plan. Pro is $450 a month billed yearly, or $540 month to month, and that's where the AI assistant, automations, preview deployments and 10,000 monthly AI credits live. It builds an API playground from your OpenAPI file and hosts llms.txt and llms-full.txt automatically. Your content sits in your own Git repo as MDX, so leaving is possible. It makes sense for an API company that would otherwise spend engineer time on docs infrastructure.

GitBook prices per site now. Free covers one user. Premium is $65 per site per month plus $12 per user per month, billed yearly, so five editors on one site cost $125 a month. Ultimate, which adds the AI assistant and authenticated access, is $249 per site plus the same $12 per user. The block editor and two-way Git sync are the reason to pay: support and product people can edit without opening a pull request.

Both are proprietary. If your developers already live in Git and write MDX, you're paying for an editor nobody on your team will open.

MkDocs: stop starting new projects on it

Older comparisons call MkDocs the simple, safe choice. In 2026 it's neither.

The last MkDocs release was 1.6.1, on 30 August 2024. In February 2026 the Material for MkDocs team wrote that MkDocs 1.x is unmaintained, and a 2.0 is in pre-release with significant breaking changes. Material for MkDocs, the theme that made MkDocs look good, went into maintenance mode in November 2025, with critical fixes promised for at least 12 months.

The same team launched Zensical in November 2025. It's MIT licensed and builds existing Material projects with minimal changes, but it's on version 0.0.60.

If you already run MkDocs with Material, nothing is on fire. Plan a move to Zensical once it settles. If you're a Python team starting today, pick Zensical knowing it's early, or pick Starlight.

Docsify: fine behind a login

Docsify 5.0.0 finally went stable on 23 July 2026, after 14 months of release candidates. It has no build step: the browser downloads your Markdown and renders it on the spot.

That's the problem for public docs. The HTML a crawler downloads is an almost empty shell. Google renders JavaScript eventually. Most AI crawlers don't render it at all. For internal runbooks, or a README that outgrew GitHub, Docsify is still the quickest thing to stand up.

Staying on Docusaurus is a real option

Docusaurus 3.10.2 came out in July 2026. It has the Rspack speed-up, React 19 support, right-to-left locales, and future flags that let you prepare for v4 one change at a time. It has the biggest plugin ecosystem of anything here.

If your site works and nobody complains about the dev server, moving buys you about nine seconds per restart and a rewrite of your sidebars. Leave when you're starting a new docs site anyway, when you want llms.txt without a community plugin, or when that dev server wait is annoying someone every single day.

Side by side

If the licence column means nothing to you, our plain-English guide to MIT, Apache and GPL covers what each one lets you do. Every open-source option here produces static HTML, so hosting is the cheapest part of the decision. We explain how we pick hosting for client projects separately.

What to do now

Answer three questions about your docs before you open any of these sites. Who writes them, developers or not? Do they need Arabic? Will your customers point AI tools at them?

Non-developers writing means GitBook. Arabic means Starlight. A React team whose users work with AI agents means Rspress. If none of those changed, stay on Docusaurus.

If Rspress is the answer, try it on your real content before deciding. Run npm create rspress@latest, copy in twenty of your existing pages, and start the dev server. You'll know inside ten minutes whether it fits.

And if your docs are part of a product launch and nobody on the team owns them yet, talk to us. We build the product and the docs site in the same repo.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best alternative to Docusaurus in 2026?

For a React team building product or API docs, Rspress. It is MIT licensed, starts its dev server in seconds on large sites, and generates llms.txt with one config line. If your docs need Arabic or another right-to-left language, pick Starlight, which has RTL built in. If the people writing the docs are not developers, GitBook is the better fit. Mintlify suits API companies that want hosting and an API playground handled for them.

Is Rspress faster than Docusaurus?

For production builds, barely. Docusaurus 3.10 uses the same Rspack bundler, and on our 500-page test the cold builds took 26 to 31 seconds for Rspress and 31 to 32 seconds for Docusaurus. The real gap is the dev server. Rspress was ready to show a deep page in about 5 seconds, Docusaurus in about 14, because Rspress only compiles the page you open.

Does Rspress support Arabic or right-to-left documentation?

Not out of the box. As of version 2.0.21, the Rspress locale settings take a language code, label, title and description, with no text direction option, and the default theme has no RTL styles. You can write the CSS yourself, but if Arabic docs are a requirement, Starlight and Docusaurus both switch a locale to right-to-left with one setting.

Is MkDocs still maintained in 2026?

Barely. The last MkDocs release was 1.6.1 in August 2024, and the Material for MkDocs team described MkDocs 1.x as unmaintained in February 2026. Material for MkDocs itself went into maintenance mode in November 2025, with critical fixes promised for at least 12 months. Its team now builds Zensical, a successor that reads existing Material projects but is still on version 0.0.x.

How hard is it to migrate from Docusaurus to Rspress?

The content moves easily, because both use MDX with React components and the same colon-fenced tip and warning blocks. What you rewrite is the structure around it: Docusaurus sidebars become Rspress _meta.json files, plugins need Rspress equivalents, and any theme components you swizzled in Docusaurus have to be rebuilt. Budget a day for a small site and treat a large one as a proper project.