What is OpenAPI Generator?
OpenAPI Generator is a community fork of the SmartBear project Swagger Codegen. It’s written in Java and utilizes mustache templates to generate SDKs in 30+ languages. The project is available on GitHub licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
For those wondering why the community forked Swagger CodeGen to create OpenAPI Generator, checkout the Q and A. My interpretation was a disagreement between SmartBear wanting to keep backwards compatibility with Swagger 2.0 and the community wanting to prioritize OpenAPI 3.x support.
If you are debating between Swagger CodeGen and OpenAPI Generator, you should establish some criteria to compare these projects.
One data point is stats from OpenHub comparing the two projects. It shows over the last 12 months OpenAPI Generator has many more contributors as well as code commits.
GitHub activity is another way to compare projects.
| Jan 4, 2023 | Swagger CodeGen | OpenAPI Generator |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 15.2k | 14.8k |
| Forks | 5.9k | 4.9k |
| Open Issues | 2906 | 3320 |
| Closed Issues | 3400 | 2809 |
| Open PRs | 381 | 419 |
| Closed PRs | 5012 | 7773 |
| Total Releases | 84 | 51 |
Probably the best way to evaluate a technology is to try it out. That's what we'll do next.
