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Comment by willwade | Hacker News Reader

Particularly like the honest take. I wouldn’t say reading this I’d go for starlight either

> When I tried to create marketing pages with Starlight in addition to the technical documentation, I nearly gave up. Coming from the Docusaurus world, this wasn't an issue as the starter template comes with a front page and a blog out of the box. You can even create multiple documentations on different paths. We used /docs, for example.

> Starlight, on the other hand, is only built for documentation and not for marketing pages. It even took an ugly hack to make sure the default path is /docs and not /.

> Please don't look at this custom script configured in our astro.config.mjs we need to execute on every page to make sure that the redirection works properly

Love the straight talking. Refreshing in the period of ai slop blogposts

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They actually hand wave and gloss over two of the other biggest drawbacks:

- Starlight is 6 years less mature than docusaurus

- the people who maintain starlight have some level of billions less at their disposal to keep the project going. If Astro and the company behind it go belly up now you have a new problem on your hands

The main appeal I can see is for someone who wants a lot more extensibility and control over the design aspect of their docs. For those who just need to slap some pretty good looking docs into a well supported framework for the next 10 years would do better with the more battle tested framework supported by BigCorp

> the people who maintain starlight have some level of billions less at their disposal to keep the project going. If Astro and the company behind it go belly up now you have a new problem on your hands

Starlight and Docusaurus aren't much different in this aspect. Meta could decide to stop paying slorber (the main maintainer of Docusaurus) at any time. I hear from friends in Meta that Docusaurus isn't even widely used internally.

Both projects are MIT-licensed, at least, and that's a plus for continuity if someone ever wants to fork them.

Disclosure: Astro core team

Yes, the difference here is that Astro considers Starlight to be a core part of our project. We use it for our own docs, as well as it being the basis for a significant percentage of our users' sites. I've no reason to believe Docusaurus's funding is in any danger, but I think the Open Collective that pays for full time Starlight development is probably a more dependable source of funding than Meta.

This has been my initial experience as well. I was kind of disappointed to find that starlight is meant to be tore entire site instead of part of a larger Astro site, which would be so nice.

There is no real reason you can't have a monorepo, with one project being the Astro site and the other Starlight docs.

True. It just limits the utility of it being built on top of Astro.

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