What should I use for a developer portal with API docs?

It depends a lot on your team, stack, and how much you want to customize, but here’s a practical shortlist.

Good default choices

1. Stoplight

Best if you want a polished developer portal with strong API design/documentation support.

• Great for OpenAPI-first workflows
• Nice docs UI out of the box
• Good collaboration features
• Easy to create a professional developer portal quickly

Best for: teams that want a strong API docs experience without building everything from scratch.

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2. Redocly

Best if your APIs are already described in OpenAPI and you want clean, modern docs.

• Excellent OpenAPI rendering
• Good developer portal capabilities
• Strong linting and governance tools
• More “docs/platform” than a generic website builder

Best for: API teams that care about quality, consistency, and governance.

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3. Mintlify

Best if you want very nice-looking docs fast, especially for developer-focused products.

• Very polished docs experience
• Easy to set up
• Good Markdown/MDX workflow
• Popular for startups and modern product docs

Best for: teams that want beautiful docs with low effort.

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4. ReadMe

Best if you want docs plus a full developer hub with API reference, guides, changelog, and interactive features.

• Strong developer portal features
• Good onboarding and analytics
• API reference and tutorials in one place
• Supports “try it” style docs

Best for: companies that want a full external developer experience, not just API reference docs.

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If you want open source / self-hosted

5. Docusaurus

Best if you want maximum control and are comfortable assembling the pieces yourself.

• Open source
• Flexible and customizable
• Great for docs sites
• Can integrate OpenAPI docs via plugins

Tradeoff: you’ll do more setup and maintenance yourself.

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6. Backstage

Best if you mean an internal developer portal, not just external API docs.

• Great for internal platform portals
• Catalogs services, APIs, ownership, runbooks, links
• Can include API docs, but it’s broader than docs alone

Best for: internal engineering portals and platform teams.

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Quick recommendation by scenario

• Need the best all-around hosted developer portal: ReadMe
• Need strong API design + docs workflow: Stoplight or Redocly
• Need beautiful docs quickly: Mintlify
• Need open source and full control: Docusaurus
• Need internal service catalog + portal: Backstage

My default pick

If you haven’t chosen yet, I’d usually suggest:

• ReadMe for a production-grade external developer portal
• Backstage for an internal portal
• Docusaurus + OpenAPI plugin if you want open source and flexibility

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a comparison table,
2. a recommendation based on your stack/budget, or
3. the best choice for REST vs GraphQL.