People sometimes ask whether ZAR competes with Mintlify. It does not. They solve different problems, and a team can happily use both.
The short version: Mintlify is about publishing docs. ZAR is about keeping docs accurate as code changes. One is the site your docs live on. The other is the check that stops your docs from going stale.
What each one is for
Mintlify is a docs platform. It takes your content and turns it into a polished, searchable, navigable documentation site, with the publishing workflow and reading experience that comes with that. It is a good product for that job.
ZAR is a GitHub App. It does not host a site and does not aim to. It lives inside your pull requests and works on the accuracy of your existing Markdown docs (README.md, docs/**/*.md) as the code around them changes.
| | ZAR | Mintlify | |---|---|---| | Core job | Docs-accuracy enforcement | Docs platform and publishing | | Where it lives | Inside GitHub PRs | A hosted docs site | | What it produces | PR comments, diffs, labels, checks, commands | A published, navigable docs site | | When it acts | At review time, on code changes | When you publish | | Output format | Minimal unified-diff patches to your Markdown | Rendered documentation pages |
How ZAR works, briefly
ZAR listens to GitHub events. When code changes, it reads the diff plus best-effort AST and symbol changes, then asks Claude to propose minimal unified-diff patches to your docs. It posts those as PR comments.
It is conservative by design: minimal diffs, never inventing facts. It is opt-in to write anything back, and dry-run mode is a hard guarantee that it never commits and never blocks a merge. If you want, it can act as a CI gate with a zar/docs commit status, or take natural-language commands in PR comments.
That whole surface, comments, diffs, labels, checks, and commands, is review-time enforcement. It is not a publishing pipeline.
They fit together
This is the useful part: the two are complementary.
- Write and ship your docs site with Mintlify.
- Let ZAR watch the underlying Markdown and code, and catch drift in the PR before it ever reaches the published site.
A stale doc on a beautifully published site is still a stale doc. ZAR's job is to make sure the content Mintlify publishes is actually correct, by catching the divergence at the moment the code changes.
Picking the right one
- If you need a hosted, searchable docs site with a good reading experience, that is Mintlify's job.
- If you need to stop docs from drifting out of sync with code, at review time, in your PRs, that is ZAR's job.
- If you want both an accurate source and a great published site, use them together.
We think Mintlify is a strong tool for what it does. ZAR just does a different thing: it makes sure the docs are right before anyone reads them.