Gramax is a free, open-source, GPL-3.0 docs-as-code application that keeps documentation as local Markdown files, edits them through a visual editor, versions them with Git, and publishes them as a customizable documentation portal or static site.

What it is

Gramax is a TypeScript application, built with Tauri and Rust on the desktop side and ProseMirror for editing, that ships as a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux and as a web app at app.gram.ax. It stores every article as a plain Markdown file on local disk, so the content stays readable and editable in any text editor and remains available offline. Workspaces hold catalogs, catalogs hold articles, and a catalog can be linked to a Git repository so that pull, push and conflict resolution happen inside the app rather than in a separate terminal.

The concrete problem it solves is the split between writers who want a comfortable visual editor and engineers who want documentation under version control next to the code. Gramax lives in the Markdown and docs-as-code ecosystem, where a static site generator would normally convert a folder of Markdown into HTML, and it targets the same job as the hosted documentation platforms GitBook and Mintlify and as conventional static site generators. Instead of forcing a choice between a hosted WYSIWYG product and a hand-rolled SSG pipeline, it provides the editor, the Git client and the publishing portal in one application.

Key capabilities

• Visual Markdown editor aimed at both technical and non-technical authors, available as a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux and as a web version.
• Local-first storage: all content lives in Markdown files on disk, editable in any text editor and accessible offline.
• Git integration with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitea and other remotes, including built-in pull, push and conflict resolution.
• Advanced content blocks: tabs, tables, video embedding, code blocks, Swagger API descriptions, and diagrams via Mermaid, Excalidraw and Diagrams.net.
• Multilingual documentation in 17 languages, including English and Spanish.
• Documentation portal that publishes catalogs to a dedicated, customizable site, deployed either with docker-compose.yaml or exported as a static site.
• Migration import from Confluence and Notion with formatting and hierarchy preserved.

Who uses it and how

• Product teams publishing a customer-facing documentation portal that is versioned alongside the product source code.
• Organizations running an internal knowledge base where non-technical staff edit in the visual editor while engineers review changes through Git.
• Teams migrating existing Confluence or Notion spaces, importing formatting and page hierarchy rather than rewriting content.
• Individual developers and writers keeping project documentation or personal notes in local Markdown with optional Git sync.
• Self-hosting teams that deploy the portal from docker-compose.yaml or build it with the CLI and serve the static output.

Getting started

Start with the editor by opening app.gram.ax in a browser or downloading the desktop build for the operating system from gram.ax. For the portal, either deploy the docker-compose.yaml published at gram.ax/docker-compose.yaml, or install the CLI with npm install -g cli and run cli build --source ./content --destination ./output.

How it compares

The README positions Gramax against GitBook, Mintlify and typical static site generators. Against the hosted products in that group, the difference is licence and custody: Gramax is GPL-3.0, free of charge and self-hostable, and the source of truth stays as ordinary Markdown files on the author's machine or server rather than as content held by a hosted platform. Against static site generators, the difference is that the editor, the Git client and the publishing portal are part of a single application, so authors do not assemble a separate theme and build pipeline.

When to use it — and when not to

Self-hosting the portal means operating a deployment, whether that is a Docker host running docker-compose.yaml or a static build served from any web server, plus Node.js for the CLI; the editor itself needs no server. The project shows a small contributor base at 605 stars, 25 forks and 279 open issues, so teams that require commercial support contracts or a fully managed service should look elsewhere, and anyone unwilling to work with Git will get little from the collaboration and publishing flow. The README is thorough on features and deployment, but assumes familiarity with Markdown and Git.