Elements is an API Documentation toolkit, leveraging OpenAPI and Markdown (CommonMark) to provide beautiful, interactive API reference documentation, that you can integrate with any existing content-management system or single-page application.
Elements is made by Stoplight, which offers hosted documentation, visual API design tools, and all sorts of other handy API tooling, but you do not need a Stoplight account to use Elements.
How you chose to work with Elements depends on what you are trying to do.
- Elements - Only need documentation for your API reference? Integrate Elements with any Content Management System, existing documentation portal, website or React application.
- Elements Dev Portal - Need a full documentation portal combining articles and guides with your API reference? Integrate Elements Dev Portal using ReactJS or HTML.
Still having trouble deciding between Elements and Elements Dev Portal? Please read our guide, Elements vs Elements Dev Portal, to better understand their differences.
Learn how to integrate Elements with any of these popular frameworks.
Learn how to integrate Elements Dev Portal with any of these popular frameworks.
If you don’t want to host your own documentation, and don’t need to embed the docs into an existing site, consider using Stoplight Documentation, which is basically hosted Elements.
The free plan will get you a long way, and there's no need to figure out deployments. If your API description documents are in a Git repo, connect that to Stoplight and it will render your documentation for you whenever commits are pushed or merged.