The question

Every documentation team eventually asks: "Should we use a documentation platform like Mintlify, GitBook, or Docusaurus, or build our own?" Here is the decision we made for School Vault Academy and why.

Options considered

Mintlify

  • Pros: Beautiful design out of the box, excellent search, good developer docs experience, AI-powered semantic search.
  • Cons: SaaS pricing ($), US/EU data residency, requires internet access at all times to serve pages, not deployable to a Nigerian cPanel hosting account.
  • Verdict for School Vault: Not suitable. School Vault Academy must be hostable on a Nigerian cPanel server without relying on a third-party SaaS that may have poor latency from Lagos, Port Harcourt, or Abuja.

GitBook

  • Pros: Clean editing interface, collaborative editing, versioning, good search.
  • Cons: SaaS-only (no self-host option for free tier), external CDN dependency, data residency outside Nigeria.
  • Verdict for School Vault: Not suitable for the same reasons as Mintlify.

Docusaurus (React-based)

  • Pros: Open source, self-hostable, excellent search (Algolia integration), great for technical documentation.
  • Cons: Requires Node.js build step, not runnable directly on a standard cPanel PHP hosting account without a build pipeline. Markdown-centric; customising for non-technical content editors requires significant React knowledge.
  • Verdict for School Vault: Viable for a team with Node.js deployment capability, but over-engineered for a cPanel-hosted school management product with a non-technical internal editing team.

Notion

  • Pros: Easy to edit, no technical skills needed, free tier available.
  • Cons: Slow page loads in Nigeria (US CDN-hosted, throttled international routes), no custom domain without paid tier, no version control, search is weak for large content libraries, no offline capability.
  • Verdict for School Vault: Not suitable. Notion's load times over Nigerian mobile data connections (3G/4G) make it impractical as a primary support resource.

Document360 / Helpjuice

  • Pros: Purpose-built knowledge base SaaS with analytics, feedback widgets, multiple language support.
  • Cons: Expensive ($99–$299/month), US/EU data residency, SaaS dependency, no local export that remains functional as a self-hosted site.
  • Verdict for School Vault: The pricing and SaaS dependency make this impractical for a bootstrapped Nigerian edtech product.

Why we chose self-hosted PHP flat-file

School Vault Academy is built on plain PHP with flat-file content storage (each article is a PHP file returning an array). The reasons:

  1. cPanel compatibility: Any cPanel hosting account with PHP 7.4+ can run the Academy. No Node.js, no Python, no Docker, no build step. Upload the files and it works.
  2. Low-bandwidth first: The Academy serves pages with zero CDN dependencies. No Google Fonts, no external CSS frameworks, no analytics scripts. Every byte served comes from the same Nigerian server as the main product. A page loads in under 2 seconds on a 3G connection.
  3. Offline-capable: School Vault support staff can download the Academy directory via FTP, open index.php in XAMPP, and browse the full knowledge base without internet, useful during customer visits at schools with poor connectivity.
  4. Editable without a CMS: Articles are PHP files editable in any text editor or the cPanel file manager. A non-technical support manager can update an article without a build step, a deployment pipeline, or a Git commit.
  5. No per-seat SaaS cost: The Academy is hosted on the same server as the School Vault application, adding zero marginal cost to the monthly hosting bill.
  6. Full data ownership: All content lives in the school's own PHP files. There is no vendor lock-in, no API to migrate away from, no account to lose access to.

Trade-offs we accepted

  • No real-time collaborative editing (but a single support writer plus quarterly reviews is sufficient for this content volume).
  • No built-in AI semantic search (the MySQL LIKE search with flat-file fallback is good enough for 70 articles).
  • No analytics dashboard out of the box (view counts in MySQL provide sufficient signal).

When to reconsider

If the Academy grows beyond ~200 articles, or if School Vault expands to a team requiring simultaneous collaborative editing, revisit Docusaurus (with a CI/CD deployment to cPanel) or a lightweight headless CMS (Directus or Strapi, self-hosted). The flat-file structure used here maps cleanly to Markdown, making a future migration straightforward.