Docszero vs MkDocs: the same site, without the pipeline

MkDocs is free software and nothing on this page is going to argue with that. Neither is the price comparison, because there isn’t one: MkDocs costs nothing, Material for MkDocs costs nothing, and as of version 9.7.0 in November 2025 even the features that were once sponsor-only are free to everyone.

What costs something is everything around the build. A repository, a CI job, a Python environment that has to keep working, somewhere to put the output, a DNS record, a certificate, and the person who fixes all of it when a dependency moves. For a team with an engineer who enjoys that, it is close to free. For a team without one, it is the reason the docs are still in a Google Doc.

Docszero builds sites with Zensical, which the Material for MkDocs team wrote as their own next generation and released under MIT. Moving here is not leaving the MkDocs family — it is staying in it and skipping the setup. Our Export source gives you your Markdown with a config that builds with plain Zensical, so going back to self-hosting is a download.

If you run Material for MkDocs, this is worth knowing before you plan the next year of your docs. With 9.7.0 the project made every Insiders feature free, discontinued the sponsorware model, and entered maintenance mode: bug and security fixes for at least twelve months, and no new features. The team’s attention moved to Zensical.

That is a generous way to wind a project down, and it leaves existing sites working. It also means the theme most MkDocs sites are built on is now a fixed target. Nothing breaks tomorrow. But the roadmap you were on has arrived at its destination, and the next one is Zensical either way — self-hosted, or here.

Three routes, and the money is only part of what separates them.

GitHub Pages on a public repository really is free, and for an open source project it is hard to beat. The cost arrives when the docs are for a product rather than a project: a private repo, a paid plan, a workflow someone owns, and a build that fails on a Friday because a plugin released a major version.

These are good reasons and we are not going to talk you out of them.

• You want to pay nothing, ever, and you have somewhere to put the output.
• Your docs must build offline, or inside a network that does not reach us.
• You depend on the plugin ecosystem — mkdocstrings, API pages generated from source, a custom hook.
• You want your own theme, or a fork of one, with no limits on what you can change.
• Docs live in the repository and version with the code, reviewed in the same pull requests.
• You would rather own the whole pipeline than trust a service with it.

Docszero does none of that. There are no plugins, no hooks, and no way to fork the theme; you get four themes, a brand colour and a logo. If what you like about MkDocs is that it does exactly what you tell it, you will find this restrictive, and you would be right.

• Nobody on the team wants to own a docs pipeline, and the docs are late because of it.
• Your writers are not engineers, and a pull request is a wall rather than a workflow.
• You want a private docs site without moving to a $50-a-month plan to get one.
• Some of the source material is a Word document or a PDF rather than Markdown.
• You want reader numbers without adding a third-party script and a cookie banner.
• You run docs for several products and would rather not stand up several pipelines.

Bringing an MkDocs site over

This is the easiest migration of any on this site, because it is already the right shape. Zip your docs/ folder and upload it. If mkdocs.yml or zensical.toml is in the zip we read your site name, description, language and navigation out of it, so your structure survives rather than being rebuilt by hand.

What will not come across is anything a plugin was doing: generated API pages, custom hooks, and theme overrides are not part of a Markdown file, so pages that depend on them need writing out. Ordinary Markdown, images, links and mermaid diagrams all arrive intact.

The export button means this decision is not permanent in either direction. Try it on the free plan with a copy of your docs folder, and if you would rather keep the pipeline, export the source and carry on as you were.

If you have the engineer and the appetite, self-host. It is free, it is completely yours, and the tools are genuinely good. That is not a consolation prize; it is the right answer for a lot of projects.

If the pipeline is the reason your documentation keeps slipping, the honest fix is to stop owning one. Docszero publishes the same family of site, free for one, $19.99 a month for ten, and hands the source back whenever you ask for it.