Popular Tools for Documenting and Sharing React Components

1. Bit

Bit is a platform for sharing components. It is an open‑source tool that lets you package components with all files and dependencies and run them out‑of‑the‑box in different applications.

With Bit you can share components across apps, discover them via a component hub, search by context, bundle size or dependencies, and view rendered snapshots.

When you open a component detail page, Bit provides an interactive live preview where you can edit the source code (JS or MD) and debug.

Install shared components with npm or Yarn, or develop and install directly with Bit, enabling team collaboration.

Quick start:

<code>Share reusable code components as a team · Bit</code><code>teambit/bit</code>

2. Storybook & Styleguidist

Storybook offers a UI component development environment that lets you browse component libraries, view different states, and develop and test components interactively.

Styleguidist is an independent React component development environment with hot‑reloading, automatic compilation, prop‑type tables, and editable examples written in MD files; it supports ES6, Flow, TypeScript and Create React App.

3. CodeSandbox, StackBlitz & friends

Online component playgrounds such as CodeSandbox and StackBlitz let you quickly create, run, and share small projects, providing live preview and automatic dependency installation.

StackBlitz, powered by Visual Studio Code, works as a web IDE for Angular and React projects, compiling and hot‑reloading on the fly.

<code>11 React UI Component Playgrounds for 2019</code>

4. Docz

Docz builds documentation sites using MDX (Markdown + JSX), allowing you to write .mdx files anywhere in the project and deploy the generated site to Netlify.

<code>pedronauck / docz</code>

5. MDX‑docs

MDX‑docs combines MDX with Next.js to document React components, mixing markdown with inline JSX and rendering editable code blocks via react‑live.

<code>jxnblk / MDX-文档</code>

6. React Docgen

React Docgen is a CLI and toolbox that extracts information from React component files using ast-types and @babel/parser to produce a JSON or JavaScript object describing the component’s API.

<code>reactjs/react-docgen</code><code>callstack/component-docs</code>