head to head · open source
devdocs vs yard
devdocs has 39,596 GitHub stars, 2,656 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped yesterday. yard has 2,011 stars, 435 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. devdocs leads on adoption by 1,869% (39,596 vs 2,011 stars). devdocs is written in Ruby under MPL-2.0; yard is written in Ruby under MIT. devdocs has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, yard 22%. devdocs was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (documentation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| devdocs | yard | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 435 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick devdocs if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick yard if
- You want the yard feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and yard fits your workflow better
About devdocs
DevDocs — API Documentation Browser DevDocs combines multiple developer documentations in a clean and organized web UI with instant search, offline support, mobile version, dark theme, keyboard shortcuts, and more. DevDocs was created by Thibaut Courouble and is operated by freeCodeCamp. We are currently searching for maintainers Please reach out to the community on Discord if you would like to join the team! Keep track of development news: Join the contributors chat room on Discord Watch the repository on GitHub Table of Contents: Quick Start · Vision · App · Scraper · Commands · Contributing · Documentation ·…
read the full devdocs overview →
About yard
YARD: Yay! A Ruby Documentation Tool Synopsis YARD is a documentation generation tool for the Ruby programming language. It enables the user to generate consistent, usable documentation that can be exported to a number of formats very easily, and also supports extending for custom Ruby constructs such as custom class level definitions. Below is a summary of some of YARD's notable features. Feature List 1. Builtin RDoc/Markdown Hybrid Support : YARD ships with a builtin markup renderer that supports both RDoc and Markdown formatting out of the box—no external gem required. You can freely mix RDoc style and…
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Frequently asked questions
Is devdocs or yard more popular?
devdocs has 39,596 GitHub stars and yard has 2,011. devdocs has the larger community by that measure.
Are devdocs and yard free?
Both are open source. devdocs is licensed under MPL-2.0 and yard under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between devdocs and yard?
devdocs is written in Ruby and yard in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, devdocs or yard?
Choose devdocs if you want the larger community (39,596 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose yard if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.