Thank you so much! Great question. Kalmia actually borrows elements from all three, but in different ways:

* On the GUI side, it leans heavily towards TinaCMS. We even considered using TinaCMS directly (Tinasaurus (https://github.com/tinacms/tinasaurus)) but ultimately built our own for better integration with our backend.

* For the backend (MDX -> HTML) generation, it's very similar to Docusaurus. We use a tool called RsPress, which is part of the RsBuild/RsPack tool suite. It's relatively new, but because it's written in Rust, it's much faster than Docusaurus. (Fun fact, if you look at the commit history you will see that we initially used Docusaurus but then migrated away from it!)

* Wiki.js is extremely extensive, but it’s dropping support for SQLite, which was a big factor for us. Also, its frontend for documentation doesn’t feel as fast as RsPress (you can try ours out on kalmia.difuse.io it's hosted on single core azure server). The biggest reason we didn’t go with Wiki.js was the versioning system—it felt clunky (or non existent for entire docs?). In Kalmia, versioning the entire documentation is just a one-click process.

So, in short, Kalmia combines a TinaCMS-like editing experience with Docusaurus-like static site generation, but with speed advantages from the latest Rust based tooling for SSG.

It looks closer to https://www.getoutline.com/

Good question that led to insightful responses. I would like to bring GitBook (https://gitbook.com) too to the comparison notes (no affiliation).

They, too, focus on the collaborative, 'similar-to-git-workflow', and versioned approach towards documentation.

Happy to see variety in the 'docs' tools area, and really appreciate it being FOSS. Looking forward to trying out Kalmia on some project soon.

Thank you for the feedback! I understand the confusion. Kalmia is indeed a server-side CMS, but its Go-based architecture allows it to be lightweight and run on various platforms, from cloud servers to smaller setups like Raspberry Pi.

Think of Kalmia as similar to Docusaurus, but with a built-in GUI—one of the most requested features from the Docusaurus community (https://docusaurus.io/feature-requests/p/make-content-editin...). With Kalmia, non-technical users can contribute to documentation without needing to know Git or Markdown, making content editing much easier.

We store the documentation data in a database (Postgres or SQLite), and markdown/HTML is generated only when updates, deletions, or creations happen. The built HTML is stored in memory for fast access, ensuring performance remains smooth even for large docs.

We’re also working on features like export to zip and GitHub Pages support, so users can host their docs externally if needed.

Regarding SSO, it’s a great suggestion. We’re looking into integrating Single Sign-On (SSO) to streamline user management and improve security. This will help with easier adoption in environments that already use OIDC for authentication. (We already supported OAuth with Github/Microsoft/Google)

Thanks again for your thoughtful input, and I appreciate you checking out Kalmia!

We saw nearly the same reduction in build times (~80-90%) as quoted in the official RsPress documentation. Keep in mind, we're using MDX, not just plain Markdown.

Source: https://rspress.dev/guide/start/introduction#build-performan...

There can be more of a difference than you might expect. In static site generators, Eleventy is about as fast as you can get in the JavaScript world, and is still 2-3x the time for Hugo in Go [1]. A couple orders of magnitude more than <10ms in this test which is predominantly markdown parsing.

Anecdotally, for large or extra large sites, the build performance gap between even Eleventy and Hugo can be quite large. And the gap from either of those to the newer JavaScript tools like Next.js is enormous.

1: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/performance/#build-performance

CSS animations. Here's a drop-in one https://animista.net/play/entrances/bounce-in/bounce-in-righ...

Tailwind! And tailwind based component libraries like flowbite made of all these possible.

It might be Mantine UI: https://ui.mantine.dev/

Pretty sure that the site itself (the documentation that is linked to) is built with it.

I don’t think there’s an existing tool that handles Markdown and Git repos without requiring users to interact with Git directly.

We’re currently developing a feature that allows you to push directly to Git from Kalmia. Instead of pushing Markdown, we’ll push the compiled HTML/JS output, eliminating the need for a build step in the Git repo and making CI/CD processes unnecessary.

Good point! We use a database (SQLite or Postgres) to enable more advanced features like versioning, collaboration, and access control, which aren't easily managed with static files alone. The database also allows us to scale better for teams with frequent updates.

While it does limit deployment to platforms like GitHub Pages, Kalmia is designed for teams that need more than just static documentation—think of it as a middle ground between static site generators and fully dynamic CMS solutions. For purely static sites, there are other great options out there, but Kalmia focuses on more interactive, collaborative documentation.

That said, we’re actually interested in providing an option for users to export and deploy it to platforms like GitHub Pages or similar, so stay tuned for future updates on that!

We’re actively working on a feature to support deployment to Git-based repos, including GitHub Pages. Stay tuned!