Docusaurus vs Nextra vs Mintlify: what you own in 2026

Quick answer (September 2026). Docusaurus and Nextra are MIT. Mintlify is not: its CLI ships under the Elastic License 2.0, which lets you read and run the code but forbids you from offering it to other people as a hosted service. That is the licence split most comparisons stop at, and it is the less interesting half. The half that decides more projects is maintenance velocity, and there the two MIT options diverge further from each other than either does from Mintlify. Measured today: Docusaurus last shipped a stable release 62 days ago, Fumadocs shipped one yesterday, and Nextra last shipped one 280 days ago.

Every figure below was read from live registry and repository state on 11 September 2026, not from a secondary article.

The three answers to one question

A docs site is the part of your stack you are least likely to revisit for two years. So the question is not which tool has the nicest sidebar. It is what you are holding when you come back to it.

Docusaurus is a React static site generator, MIT licensed, copyright "Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates". It builds static HTML you can host on anything.

Nextra is a Next.js framework, MIT licensed, copyright "Shu Ding". If your product is already Next.js, the docs live in the same app.

Mintlify is a hosted documentation platform with a source-available CLI. You write MDX; Mintlify renders and hosts it.

Axis 1: the licence you actually get

Two of these are plain MIT and there is nothing to argue about. Docusaurus carries MIT License / Copyright (c) Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates. Nextra carries MIT License / Copyright (c) 2020 Shu Ding.

Mintlify is the one worth reading carefully, and the common shorthand for it is wrong in both directions. It is not open source, and it is not closed either.

The mint package on npm declares Elastic-2.0. Rather than trust the metadata, it is worth opening the tarball: version 4.2.887 is 4,381 bytes and contains five files, one of which is the licence. The restriction that matters reads, verbatim:

"You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

And immediately after it:

"You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key."

That is the Elastic License 2.0, a source-available licence rather than an OSI-approved open source one. You may read the code, run it, modify it and redistribute it. You may not stand it up as a docs-hosting service for other people, and you may not disable the licence key.

For most teams writing their own docs, neither restriction binds. If you are a platform company planning to offer docs hosting to your own customers, the first one is the whole ballgame, and it is better to find that out now than after you have built on it.

One detail worth knowing about what you installed: that 4,381-byte mint package is a launcher. Its only dependency is @mintlify/cli, pinned at exactly 4.0.1490, which unpacks to 1,702,841 bytes across 33 dependencies and carries the same Elastic-2.0 licence. Nothing underhanded is going on, but npm i -g mint does not install the thing you think it installs.

Axis 2: release velocity, which is where the real split is

This is the axis that changed our recommendation, so here is the raw data rather than a verdict.

Nextra has not shipped a stable release in 280 days. Its main branch has not received a commit since 23 June 2026.

Now the part that keeps this honest, because the obvious reading of that number is too strong. Nextra is not abandoned. The repository carries 30 branches including several of the maintainer's own working branches, 52 open pull requests, and a most-recent push on 31 July 2026. A project can be stable and quiet rather than dead, and Nextra genuinely might be.

The fairness check that matters is Docusaurus, because at 62 days it does not look especially fast either, and its own history has a 172-day stable gap between 3.9.2 on 17 October 2025 and 3.10.0 on 7 April 2026. A long gap between stable releases, on its own, proves nothing.

What separates them is the channel underneath. Docusaurus publishes canary builds continuously: 3.10.1-canary-6800 went out on 11 September 2026, and the repository was pushed the same day. Fumadocs shipped six stable releases in the fifteen days to 10 September. Nextra has neither a recent stable nor a moving main.

So the honest statement is narrower than "Nextra is dead" and more useful: if you adopt Nextra today you are pinning to a release cut in December 2025, and you should decide that deliberately rather than by default.

Axis 3: who holds the copyright

Worth thirty seconds because it is the thing nobody checks.

• Docusaurus: Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates. Corporate-backed, 66,226 stars, first commit June 2017. It has outlived several React doc-tooling fashions.
• Nextra: Shu Ding, an individual. 13,920 stars, first commit June 2020.
• Fumadocs: Fuma, an individual. 13,117 stars, first commit July 2023, and it has very nearly caught Nextra's star count in three fewer years.
• Mintlify: Mintlify, Inc., a company with a commercial product.

Individual copyright is not a red flag on its own; Fumadocs is the most active project in this comparison and is one person's work. But it is the correct lens for the Nextra question specifically, because a single-maintainer project with a stalled release train is a different risk from a corporate-backed one with a stalled release train.

The Mintlify org is also worth a glance for what it says about the boundary. Its most-starred public repository, mintlify/writer at 3,128 stars and MIT licensed, was archived on 12 June 2026. The starter kits, documentation content and UI components are MIT. The MDX parser carries no licence file at all. The engine that renders and hosts is not in there. That is a coherent and fairly typical open-core boundary, and it is exactly the boundary you inherit.

The option this comparison keeps pointing at

If you came here because your product is Next.js and you were choosing between Nextra and a hosted platform, Fumadocs is the answer that keeps falling out of the data: MIT, Copyright (c) 2023 Fuma, 349 stable releases of fumadocs-ui, the most recent yesterday.

We are not scoring it as a headline option here because the Fumadocs-versus-Nextra-versus-Docusaurus comparison is already well covered elsewhere, including on Fumadocs' own comparisons page. But leaving it out of a 2026 Next.js docs decision would be dishonest, so: it is there, it is MIT, and it is the one moving fastest.

What we would actually pick

Choose Docusaurus if the docs need to outlive the team. MIT, corporate copyright, a moving main, and static HTML output that will still build and deploy long after whoever set it up has moved on. It is the least exciting answer and the most durable one.

Choose Fumadocs if the docs live inside a Next.js product and you want current momentum. Same MIT terms as Nextra, in an actively shipping project.

Choose Nextra with your eyes open. It is a good framework and it may well be merely quiet. But adopting it today means running a December 2025 release, and that should be a decision rather than an accident.

Choose Mintlify if you want the hosted product and the writing experience, and the Elastic License 2.0 restrictions do not touch your business. Read the two clauses quoted above first. For most teams they are irrelevant; for a platform company intending to resell docs hosting, they are disqualifying.

The reason we keep coming back to the licence and the release log rather than the feature list is that features are what you evaluate in week one, and these are what you live with in year two. If you are assembling the rest of that stack, our headless CMS comparison applies the same test to the content layer.

Method. Star counts, branch counts, pull request counts, copyright lines, push dates and archive status were read from the GitHub REST API on 11 September 2026. Version numbers, publish timestamps, declared licences and unpacked sizes were read from the npm registry on the same date. The Elastic License 2.0 text was read from the LICENSE file inside the published mint 4.2.887 tarball rather than from the registry metadata. Stable release counts exclude canary and prerelease versions.