Starlight
Astro's documentation theme. Framework-agnostic docs, with Astro's flexibility.
VISIT STARLIGHTKey takeaway: The reason to choose Starlight over Docusaurus is not the documentation features, which are close to identical. It is that when you need a page the theme never anticipated, you are in an ordinary Astro project rather than fighting a framework's plugin system. That escape hatch is worth a lot over a site's life.
Quick facts
- LanguageTypeScript
- CategoryMulti-framework
- LicenseMIT
- Created2023
- GitHub stars7.4k
- Statusactive
Templating: Astro JSX Vue Svelte Markdown MDX
What it is
Starlight is Astro's official documentation theme. Built on Astro, supports any UI framework as components, includes search, i18n, dark mode, and the boring 80% of a docs site out of the box.
Best for
- Framework-agnostic documentation sites
- Open-source library docs where the team is not React-locked
- Multi-language documentation projects
When not to pick it
Skip Starlight if your team is already deep in the React ecosystem and Docusaurus fits, both are excellent choices for docs.
My take
Starlight is the strongest framework-agnostic docs option in 2026. If you do not have a strong reason to be in the React (Docusaurus) or Vue (VitePress) camp, default to Starlight.
A theme, not a framework, and why that matters
Starlight is an Astro integration, so a Starlight site is an Astro site with a documentation theme applied. Everything true of Astro stays true: you can add a marketing landing page, a pricing page, a changelog, or an API endpoint in the same project, use React or Vue or Svelte components inside MDX, and use Astro's image pipeline and content collections without special handling. Customisation happens through component overrides, where you replace one named piece of the theme with your own component and leave the rest untouched, rather than ejecting a whole layout and inheriting its maintenance forever. That design keeps upgrades cheap. Out of the box you get sidebar generation, site search, dark mode, internationalisation with per-language sidebars, code highlighting through Expressive Code, and the last-updated and edit-this-page links every documentation site eventually asks for.
Choosing between the three documentation defaults
Starlight, Docusaurus, and VitePress all solve this problem well, and the honest tiebreaker is your team's framework rather than a feature matrix. Docusaurus if the company is React throughout and people will want React components everywhere without thinking about hydration boundaries. VitePress if you are a Vue shop, or if you want the fastest authoring loop and the plainest output. Starlight if you are neither, or if the documentation site also has to serve as the marketing site. Starlight's weaker spots are versioned documentation, which Docusaurus handles natively and Starlight leaves to community plugins or your own routing, and the sheer volume of existing examples, where Docusaurus's head start still shows. If versioned docs are a hard requirement, that alone can decide it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Starlight a separate framework from Astro?
No. It is an official Astro integration, so you install Astro and add Starlight to it. Everything you know about Astro applies: content collections, the image pipeline, framework components as islands, and the standard build output. That is the main structural difference from Docusaurus, where the docs framework is the whole project rather than a theme inside a general-purpose one.
Starlight or Docusaurus?
Docusaurus if your team is React-native and you want versioned documentation working on day one. Starlight if the team is framework-agnostic, if you also need marketing or blog pages in the same project, or if you want less client JavaScript in the shipped output. Both cover search, internationalisation, and dark mode competently, so the deciding factors are versioning and how far the site strays from documentation.
Can I add non-documentation pages to a Starlight site?
Yes, and this is the main reason to choose it. Because the project is a normal Astro site, you add pages, layouts, and endpoints in the usual way and they sit alongside the documentation without fighting the theme. Plenty of teams run their marketing homepage, blog, and docs from a single Starlight project with one deployment.
Links
Compare Starlight side-by-side
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If Starlight is your pick, the next conversation is short
The 30-min call is where your project gets a real architecture, an SEO transport plan, and a price range you can take to your team. Describe your site, your timeline, your existing content. I tell you whether Starlight is genuinely the right call for you, and what the build actually looks like.