OpenAPI Specification format comparison

Category	Title	Swagger	RAML	API Blue Print
Summary	Pros	High adoption rate, good code-level tooling, large and active community of users and supporters, greater support for multiple languages	Good online design tools and mature supporting infrastructure, seemingly useful advanced constructs, human readable format, hight industry backing	Good online design tools, good community involvement, easy to understand, simple to write
Summary	Cons	Bottom-up, lacks advanced constructs for metadata	Very new to the game, low adoption, lacks code-level tooling, still unproven long-term	New to the game, low adoption, lacks advanced constructs and code-level tooling, complex installation
Basic	Primary Sponsor	SmartBear	MULESOFT	APIARY
Basic	Format	JSON	YAML	MARKDOWN
Basic	Initiatives towards Industry Standard	Open API Initiative (OAI) - Has announced an open governance model around the Swagger Specification under the Linux Foundation.	Not Availaible	Not Availaible
Basic	Open Source Inititives	The Swagger page claims  itself to be 100% open source software. Starting January 1st 2016 the Swagger Specification has been donated to to the Open API Initiative (OAI) and has been renamed to the OpenAPI Specification.	RAML is backed by a large open source community providing hundreds of pre-built, customizable tools.	API Blueprint is completely open sourced under the MIT license.
Basic	Industry Backing	Reverb, 3Scale, Apigee	Mulesoft, SOA, AngularJS, Intuit, Box, PayPal, & Programmable Web	Apiary
Basic	Current Version	2	1	1A9
Basic	Workgroup	Yes	Yes	No
Basic	Initial commit	July 2011	September 2013	April 2013
Basic	API Design Approach	Bottom-up	Top-down	Top-down
Community	Community Based	By far has the largest comnmunity and has been around since 2011.	Has gained lot of traction of late in the enterprises. RAML is backed by a large open source community providing hundreds of pre-built, customizable tools for all your RESTful API needs	Is up and coming
Community	Stackoverflow questions	3181	288	696
Community	GitHub Stars	3773	391	3002
Community	GitHub contributors	114	26	38
Community	GitHub whatchers	276	154	147
Community	GitHub forks	2196	118	872
Community	Google search (name + “rest”)	733K	85K	350K
REST Modeling	Stub generators	Yes	Yes	Yes (Limited Languages).
REST Modeling	Resources	X (“api”)	X	X
REST Modeling	Methods/ Actions	X (“operation”)	X (“method”)	X (“action”)
REST Modeling	Query Parameters	X	X	X
REST Modeling	Path/URL Parameters	X	X	X
REST Modeling	Header Parameters	X	X	X
REST Modeling	Representations (status codes, mime-types)	X	X	X
REST Modeling	Documentation	X	X	X
REST Modeling	Authentication	Basic, API-Key, OAuth 2	Basic, Digest, Oauth, 1&2
REST Modeling	Representation Metadata	JSON Schema (subset)	(inline/ external)	(inline)
REST Modeling	Nested Resources		X	X
REST Modeling	Composition/ Inheritance		Traits, Resource Types	Resource Models
REST Modeling	File inclusions		X
REST Modeling	API Version metadata	X	X
REST Modeling	Sample Representations		X	X
Tooling	Live Documentation Demo	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tooling	Authoring	(3rd party)	API-Designer	apiary.io
Tooling	Ad-hoc testing	Swagger-UI	API-Console	apiary.io
Tooling	API Console	Every HTTP Action Verb is separate	Grouped by endpoint with drill down into verbs	Unknown
Tooling	API Builder	Tools for most popular languages	MuleStudio APIKit (Visual, drag and drop), Osprey (Node)	Node & .Net bindings
Tooling	Documentation Builder	Single page documentation builder	Single or multiple page documentation builder (PHP only)	Single or multiple page documentation builder
Tooling	Mocking	(3rd party)	X	X
Tooling	Server Code	Java, scala, ruby, node.js	Java	(3rd party)
Tooling	Generate from code	Java, 3rd party (go, python)
Tooling	Language Support	Clojure, Go, JS, Java, .Net, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala	JS, Java, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby	Node, .Net
Tooling	Validation	X	X (java)	X
Tooling	Parsing	Java, js	Java, js	C++ (nodejs, c#)
Tooling	Easy of Getting Started	Very easy, everything in Github repos	Very easy, everything in Github repos	Installation required