Documentation · pricing
Starlight pricing
Starlight publishes a single tier. Below is what it costs, what it covers, and how that compares with the documentation tools listed alongside it.
As of 31 August 2026, Starlight pricing is free. Figures are the vendor's list prices as recorded on this page's last check; the vendor's site is the final word.
- Entry price
- Free
- Model
- Open source, no licence fee
- Tiers
- 1
- Free tier
- Yes
Starlight plans, side by side
Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.
| Plan | Price | Features listed | Step up from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open source | Free | 4 | Entry tier |
Where Starlight stops being free
Open source, Free
- MIT licence
- All features included
- Self hosted on any static host
- Community support via Discord and GitHub
No paid tier on record
Starlight lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.
What the product covers
The full Starlight feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.
Other
- File based routing
- Pagefind search
- Internationalisation
- Component overrides
- Zero client JavaScript
- Expressive Code blocks
- Auto generated sidebar
People bring Starlight in for a developer tool whose docs live in the same repository as the code and are reviewed in the same pull request, a team that already runs astro for its marketing site and wants one build pipeline for both, documentation that must be served from a cdn or an air gapped static host with no search backend, a multilingual open source project that needs per locale content trees and untranslated page fallback. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to Starlight are worth a look before you commit to a tier.
How that compares in Documentation
Too few documentation tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Rated | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starlight (this page) | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | |
| Paligo | On request | Per author seat per year | - | vs Starlight |
| Guidde | Free, then $19/month | Per creator per month | - | vs Starlight |
| Adobe RoboHelp | On request | Per user per month, annual commitment | - | vs Starlight |
| HelpDocs | On request | Per editor seat per month | - | vs Starlight |
| MadCap Flare | On request | Per author per year, annual subscription only | - | vs Starlight |
| Doxygen | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Starlight |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the Starlight badges page.
Before you pay for Starlight
Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.
What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: a single tier at Free. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.
Starlight runs on web, macos, windows, linux, and is published by The Astro Technology Company of Remote, United States. The full record is on the Starlight review, and the rest of the category is under best documentation tools.
Starlight pricing questions
- How much does Starlight cost?
- Starlight publishes a single tier, Open source, at Free.
- Does Starlight have a free plan?
- Yes. The Open source tier costs nothing and covers mit licence, all features included, self hosted on any static host.
- Which documentation tools can I use without paying?
- 4 of the 8 documentation tools listed alongside Starlight have a free tier: Guidde, Doxygen, Fumadocs, BookStack.
- What am I actually paying for with Starlight?
- The record lists 7 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for a developer tool whose docs live in the same repository as the code and are reviewed in the same pull request, a team that already runs astro for its marketing site and wants one build pipeline for both, documentation that must be served from a cdn or an air gapped static host with no search backend.
- Does Starlight charge per user?
- The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
- Are these Starlight prices current?
- They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
- What should I compare Starlight against before paying?
- The closest documentation tools in this directory are Paligo, Guidde, Adobe RoboHelp, HelpDocs. Each has a side-by-side comparison with Starlight covering price, platforms and features.