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Add to SafariWhen comparing Doxygen vs Sphinx, the Slant community recommends Sphinx for most people. In the question“What are the best Python documentation generators?” Sphinx is ranked 1st while Doxygen is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Sphinx is:
It supports reStructuredText in docstrings and produces an HTML output with a clean visual style. Automatic links for functions, classes, citations and glossary terms. It has a hierarchical structure and automatic indices.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
Pro Generates documentation from comments
Doxygen can generate documentation from formatted comments in the source code. This is extremely useful when writing detailed man pages.
Pro Cross-platform
Doxygen is compatible with multiple languages. Including but not limited to: C, Objective-C, C#, C++, Java, Python, PHP etc...
Pro Output comes with different format
It supports reStructuredText in docstrings and produces an HTML output with a clean visual style. Automatic links for functions, classes, citations and glossary terms. It has a hierarchical structure and automatic indices.
Pro Good documentation and lots of examples listed on their website
Sphinx documentation is well written and very detailed. From beginner to advanced user can easily navigate through their navigation.
Cons
Con i18n support is poor
Cannot work properly with non-ascii paths on Windows
Con PDF output is very problematic
Doxygen PDF output relies on the now broken LaTeX tabu package which was abandoned over a decade ago by its developer.
Con No recursive inclusion
For example, if you specify INCLUDE_PATH=incl, it doesn't search other folders included in the incl folder (incl/sub1 or incl/sub2) and there's no option to turn on recursive inclusion.
Con Too complex for a beginner
It requires a bit of configuration. It introduces using Makefile. It can also be run using a quickstart script but also requires a bit of steps to begin.
