When comparing Doxygen vs Sphinx, the Slant community recommends Doxygen for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source documentation generators for C/C++?” Doxygen is ranked 1st while Sphinx is ranked 2nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Good search performance
Pro Fast indexing
Since Sphinx talks directly to the database, indexing speed is very fast.
Pro Rich database-like querying features
Pro Batch and real-time full-text indexes
Pro SQL database indexing
Pro Advanced full-text searching syntax
Pro Easy application integration
Pro Non-text attributes support
Pro Non-SQL storage indexing
Pro Good relevance ranking
By default results are ranked by relevance. If you wish, you can adjust the ranking by giving more weight to certain fields.
Pro Excellent scalability
Pro Distributed searching
Pro Flexible text processing
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.