About Stoplight Elements
Stoplight Elements is an OpenAPI documentation toolkit from Stoplight.
Elements can be used through React components or web components to build API reference documentation and developer documentation pages powered by OpenAPI and Markdown.
Use our Online Stoplight Elements page when you want to load an OpenAPI file from a URL or from disk and see it rendered on this site.
What Stoplight Elements Shows
Stoplight Elements can render OpenAPI descriptions as interactive API reference documentation.
It is designed for teams that want embeddable documentation components, often as part of a wider developer portal or documentation site.
It adopts the side-bar approach to show all the endpoints on the left with the detailed documentation on the right. There are more code generation options present than cURL, so this makes it very suitable for putting in front of programmers, although this also makes the UI a little harder to understand at first.
The interface to send a request is simple, with configured fields accessible above the "Send API Request" button and the response shown inline.
The interface does not seem as responsive on smaller screens as other embedded clients that we tried.
When To Consider Stoplight Elements
Stoplight Elements is worth evaluating when you want:
- multi-language and multi-framework support
- a simple sending interface
- side-bar navigation
- embeddable documentation components
As with any browser-based OpenAPI UI, requests made from the rendered documentation may still be limited by CORS or other browser restrictions. Use a desktop REST client or proxy when you need to verify exactly what traffic was sent.
Related OpenAPI Pages
Read OpenAPI for API Testing for the specification background, or compare Stoplight Elements with Swagger UI, OpenAPI Explorer, Scalar, Zudoku, and Redoc.
Try Stoplight Elements With Our APIs
Try Stoplight Elements with our APIs: