
GitBook
Easily create great documentation using a powerful, intuitive editor with full Markdown support.
What is GitBook?
GitBook is a tool for building beautiful books using Git and Markdown. It can generate your book into multiple formats:
Static Website: This is the default format, it generates a complete interactive static website. PDF: A complete PDF book with exercise solutions at the end of the book. eBook: A complete eBook with exercise solutions at the end of the book.
The legacy version of GitBook is open source, but is no longer developed.
GitBook Screenshots




GitBook Features
GitBook information
Supported Languages
- English
GitHub repository
- 25,265 Stars
- 3,761 Forks
- 1012 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Documentation Generator
- static-website
- book-publishing
The suggested alternatives does different things than GitBook.
GitBook is a tool in which you can create FAQ, Manual, KBs and manage a software documentation collaboratively. Not exactly a book to put on the shelf on download to a kindle, but a live and online documentation site.
All the alternatives listed were more related to books creation and publishing.
Free for unlimited "public book" Able to edit from multiple users Versionning managed (but no, we can't fork ;-) Format supported: PDF, EPUB, MOBI Rich Text supported, with image. Very nice :)
The old version was good, but they created a new version which misses a lot of basic functionality (can not view Markdown source, can not export to PDF). It was a great tool, but it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.
As it stated, GitBook is great for creating books, as they do not require any special formatting, text/code inclusion and cross-linking. But when it comes to creating documentation (where many people think GitBook is good at), GitBook fails. I've been using it for more than a year as a documentation tool and it is a terrible experience. Our documentation is created in Markdown and the more it grows, the more I am stuck with numerous GitBook limitations. Even creating a link to a document or a page that should be located outside the Summary is a real headache.
Along with Markdown, GitBook supports AsciiDoc that is expected to be a problem solver. However, in GitBook AsciiDoc has an extremely truncated functionality.