Introducing Doctave: A Modern Documentation Stack
This post was originally published on the Doctave blog
We are happy to announce that Doctave is now open to the public! 🎉 The free trial lets you try all of Doctave’s features. Sign up at doctave.com.
Doctave is a platform for creating and hosting public and private documentation. We focus on workflows that are common for modern product teams in order to make it easy to create and maintain documentation for your product.
Doctave emphasizes git-based workflows without compromising the editing experience for non-technical contributors. Doctave is used today by modern SaaS customers to host their public or private documentation, as well as API reference.
Our goal was to enable teams to create and maintain documentation for their product with the docs-as-code approach. By treating documentation as code, our early customers have managed to align documentation tasks with the daily workflows of product teams. This in turn has resulted in better collaboration between developers, product owners and technical writers — ultimately leading to better, and up-to-date documentation.
Succesful teams building great products use issue tracking tools, version control, and CI/CD pipelines. We noticed that documentation was not a first class citizen in these workflows.
How is Doctave different?
Best-practices make a big difference! Successful teams building great products use issue tracking tools, version control, and CI/CD. We noticed that documentation was not a first class citizen in these workflows, and set out to fix this. Doctave integrates with your existing product workflows and best-practices.
While other solutions actively “wall off” the documentation from the rest of your product, Doctave integrates seamlessly into your existing product workflows and best-practices.
We think software teams will be excited about:
- Using Markdown and existing tools, including your favourite text editor.
- Local previews, without any setup using the optional desktop-app.
- Integrations to CI/CD pipelines, to keep documentation always up to date.
- Using Git and pull requests to surface tasks in existing issue tracking tools.
- Combining OpenAPI specifications and written guides seamlessly.
- The professional look-and-feel, with a focus on your product and its color theme.
Exciting new features
In addition to the features above, we are excited to announce some new features:
- Multi-version management, for maintaining multiple versions of documentation.
- Privacy friendly analytics, to understand what resonates with your readers.
Doctave supports multi-version management and analytics features that are useful for continued management of your documentation. For example, you can grant one of your customers access to a custom version of your documentation, or document multiple versions of your API.
On top of that there’s a lot brewing in the technical writing community. Since Doctave is based on plaintext markdown files, Doctave is co-pilot ready. That means you can use GitHub’s new AI-powered completion tool to help you write documentation.
What is coming next?
There are a lot of exciting features in the pipeline. GraphQL, Sandbox environments, custom layouts? If you have particular features you would like to see, please let us know! If you are interested in following the development of Doctave, you can follow us on Twitter.
Go give Doctave a try today and let us know what you think! We are excited to hear your feedback and ideas for the future.
