Best documentation tool for teams: who edits it, and where the files live

The best documentation tool for a team comes down to two questions: who has to be able to edit the docs, and where the text physically lives while they do. Engineers writing public docs want files in Git, everyone else wants an editor, and almost every tool on the market picks one of those two sides.

The lists ranking for this search are mostly published by documentation vendors, and they compare the editor, the templates and the AI assistant. Those are what you notice in a two-week trial. What you notice in year three is different. The day the contract, the price or the vendor changes, one kind of tool leaves you holding a folder of files and the other leaves you holding an export, and the export is rarely in the format you wrote in.

So this page sorts on the two questions that decide what a documentation tool costs you after you have picked it. Baalda is on the list for one narrow case: internal docs that a whole team edits at the same time and that have to stay plain markdown files on your own disks. For public developer docs it is the wrong tool, and the section near the end says so in detail.

Which documentation tool should a team pick?

Eight candidates, with what each is genuinely best at. Licences are read from each project's own licence file. Prices are left out on purpose: the four paid products price per editor in different ways and change it often, so check the pricing page on the day you buy.

The top half of the table is for docs your customers read. The bottom half is for docs your team reads. Most of the bad purchases in this category come from buying a tool from one half for a job in the other: a Confluence space used as a public developer portal, or a Docusaurus repo that the support team is expected to keep current. If the docs you are choosing for are an internal wiki, the wiki software comparison goes further on that half than this page does.

Why do documentation tools split into Git and editors?

Because each side buys something the other cannot. Docs-as-code puts every page in the repository next to the code it describes. Mintlify's own quickstart states the model plainly: "Every page on your site has a corresponding file stored in your documentation repository." Changes go through pull requests, docs are versioned with releases, and there is nothing to export because the repo already is the docs.

The cost is that every editor needs Git. In practice the product manager or the support lead writes the correction in a chat message and an engineer pastes it in, which means the people closest to the customer are the slowest to fix the docs.

Editors like Confluence and Notion make the opposite trade. Anybody can fix a page in a browser in ten seconds, and the text lives in the vendor's database rather than in files you hold.

Two products try to sit across the line, and both are built for public docs with a publish step. GitBook's Git Sync is described in its documentation as "bi-directional, so changes you make directly in GitBook's editor are automatically synced, as are any commits made on GitHub or GitLab." Mintlify's web editor writes back to the same repository: "you can work on your documentation locally or in the web editor and sync any changes to your remote repository." If your docs are public, one of those two is very likely the right answer and you can stop reading here.

What happens to the docs when you leave the tool?

This is the question to ask the vendor before signing, because the answers are very different.

• Docusaurus, MkDocs, Mintlify. Nothing happens to the text. It is files in your repository, and leaving means pointing a different generator at the same folder.
• GitBook. If Git Sync was switched on, the Markdown is already in your GitHub or GitLab repository. If it was not, you start from an export.
• Notion. Notion's help page says "Any non-database Notion page can be exported as a Markdown file", while full-page databases export as CSV. That is a usable exit for prose and a lossy one for anything built on databases.
• Confluence Cloud. Atlassian's export page offers a single page as Word or PDF, and a whole space as "PDF, CSV, HTML, or XML". Markdown is not on the list, so a move to any markdown tool runs through an HTML or XML conversion step.
• Docmost. You hold the PostgreSQL database because you run it, and its documentation says "You can export individual pages as Markdown or HTML files", with whole spaces downloaded as a ZIP.

The deeper version of this axis, where the text sits while the tool is running and what that does to a migration, is worked through in Confluence alternatives that keep the markdown.

Can a team co-edit internal docs and still keep them as markdown in Git?

This is the gap in the table above: the tools where everyone edits comfortably keep the text in a database, and the tools that keep the text as files want everyone to use Git. It is also the one case Baalda is built for.

A Baalda vault is a folder of markdown files. The vault documentation draws the layout like this:

VaultRoot/
├── Notes/ … .md                 # the source of truth: human, AI and git editable
├── attachments/ …               # images, PDFs, other files
└── .context/                    # the app's own folder, never indexed or synced

Each note is a CRDT document that the app keeps reconciled with the file on disk. When a teammate types, the change is an operation that merges with whatever everyone else is typing, and it is written back to the .md file atomically. When something outside the app writes the file, the change is diffed into operations the same way and reaches the rest of the team. If someone is typing in that note at the moment the file changes, the app merges the two rather than letting the later write overwrite the earlier one.

The detail that makes Git possible is a short list in the desktop app's source: the folders it never walks, watches, indexes or syncs are .context and .git, along with every dotfile and build folders such as node_modules and dist. So the folder can also be a Git working tree. On the one machine that owns the Git side:

cd <your vault folder>
git init
printf '.context/\n' > .gitignore
git add . && git commit -m "Docs snapshot"

.context/ has to be ignored, because the documentation warns never to sync it through another tool: it carries the device's identity. From there the support lead edits a page in the app, live with whoever else has it open, and the change lands in the file as plain markdown that Git can commit and a generator can read. When an engineer's commit is pulled into that folder, the pulled text is diffed into the live notes and the team sees the change the way it would see a colleague typing. A local agent such as Claude Code can be pointed at the same folder and edit the files directly, with the watcher syncing what it writes. The mechanics are in the vaults documentation.

Two file-type details matter for docs repos. .mdx files are part of Baalda's note family, so a Docusaurus or Mintlify page opens in the editor and co-edits like any note, though the components inside it show as source text rather than rendering. And generator config in JavaScript, such as docusaurus.config.js, is not on the app's file allowlist, so it stays in Git and never syncs. A docs.json or YAML config does sync, as a file attachment rather than as a live-edited note.

For internal docs this also answers the vendor question above in the strongest way available. Every member already has the files on their own disk, so there is no export to run.

Where is Baalda the wrong documentation tool?

More often than this page might suggest, and the reasons are structural.

• It does not publish a docs site. There is no navigation sidebar, no versioned docs, no search page for customers and no API reference rendered from an OpenAPI file. A single note can be given a read-only public link, which is one page and not a site. For public docs, use one of the four tools at the top of the table, and if you like, feed it from a Baalda folder.
• There is no browser editor. Baalda is a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. A company where everyone has to read the docs from a link with nothing installed is better served by Confluence, Notion or Docmost.
• There is no Git integration, only Git compatibility. Baalda has no branches and no pull request review of its own. A vault folder is one working tree, so checking out another branch in it rewrites the files, and the app will treat that as edits and send that branch's text to the whole team. Keep Git on one machine and one branch, do review in your Git host, and let version history in the app catch mistakes in between. Two people each running Git in their own copy of the vault will commit the same changes twice.

Baalda is Apache-2.0 and free to run locally or self-host. The managed backend is free for two people and one synced vault, and Team is $10 per seat per month, or $110 per seat per year, with a minimum of three seats. For writing the docs themselves rather than choosing the tool, start with how to write internal documentation.

So which documentation tool should you use?

• Public developer docs, written by engineers. Docusaurus if you want a React site you control, MkDocs if you want the shortest path from a folder of Markdown to a site.
• Public developer docs that non-engineers also edit. Mintlify or GitBook, both of which write the web editor's changes back to your repository.
• Internal docs everyone reads in a browser, and you already run Jira. Confluence, knowing that leaving means converting HTML or XML.
• Internal docs for people who will never write markdown. Notion.
• Internal docs you host yourself, in a browser. Docmost.
• Internal docs the whole team co-edits that must stay markdown files you own, readable by Git and by AI agents. Baalda, after reading the limits above.