The ReadMe Documentation Management Tool

As an edtech platform, we have built our own LMS system and our own database system to provide a good understanding of how students are onboarded, how students are taken care of, and a database system where we have a Monday-based CRM. We primarily use ReadMe to host the interactive developer portals for documenting our LMS platform's API for external integrations and delivering professional API documentation to new team members that we onboard into our engineering team. The interactive console helps developers test endpoints quickly, which reduces our overall support load during handoffs.

Here is a workflow that we tailor to our custom LMS, our database, and our CRM setup, and this is how ReadMe solves a practical problem for both of our internal onboarding and external integration systems. With ReadMe, there is a noticeable difference in how we are onboarding a new developer onto our engineering team. Since we have already built our LMS system and our database system that integrates with the Monday CRM to track student registrations and onboarding statuses, historically we had to have onboarding calls with team members and explain how these systems interact. We also had to have senior engineers hold multiple walkthrough sessions, share API keys, run manual requests in Postman, and give them a full demo. With ReadMe, the workflow becomes much more efficient because it becomes a self-guided onboarding experience. The new developer is simply handed the ReadMe portal where they have documentation of the entire endpoints responsible for syncing data from our LMS and utilizing other items in the LMS. We can use all the endpoints to see the current student status, invite a new user, re-invite a user, or add subjects to the portal. Things become much easier with interactive testing. We had development API keys that the developer used in the console to directly trigger mock student onboarding. This became friendlier with immediate feedback. They could instantly see how the database processed requests for each of the mock student statuses updated in our dev or staging CRM environment, all without having to write a single line of local code first. This reduced our developer onboarding time for the specific integration from days of back and forth to self-training and self-served afternoon tasks, freeing up the senior engineer to focus on the current development that they are working on.

The positive impact of ReadMe on our company can be felt in how we are onboarding new people and the efficiency of the engineering team on its own, and our ability to have broader product capabilities. Specifically, there are three measurable outcomes for our LMS platform. Getting external clients or schools integrated into our custom LMS system used to be a bottleneck. With ReadMe serving as a clear, self-service developer portal, our partners can now complete their integration in a fraction of the time. This has accelerated project delivery timelines and improved our partner satisfaction and optimized engineering promises.

Based on experience, the standout features that offer the most value to our workflow are probably the interactive API explorer. The 'try it' functionality is easily one of the platform's strongest features. It allows both our internal developers and external partners to test live API calls directly on the documentation page where they can use their own development keys or where we also provide the staging keys. This eliminates the need to configure any third-party tools such as Postman for a quick test. We can read through the documentation and run the test simultaneously in ReadMe portal, and it becomes straightforward.

We also have automatic multi-language code snippets. Once ReadMe files are generated, it can auto-generate accurate code snippets in different languages such as Curl, Node.js, Python, and Ruby for each of the endpoints we document. For onboarding engineers and external partners who work in different tech stacks, this drastically reduces the time they take to write integration code. They can copy and paste the code in the language they are comfortable in, and it works.

There is a seamless integration of OpenAPI. Instead of manually writing out tables of request parameters and response schemas, we simply upload our OpenAPI specification file. ReadMe parses it and generates the interactive UI automatically. This ensures our core database schemas and LMS endpoints are always accurate and well documented with minimal manual formatting.

We also have a user-friendly Markdown editor, which strikes a very good balance between technical control and ease of use. It allows our team to insert styled warning blocks, info call-outs, or any code examples. This is particularly useful for highlighting guidelines in our integration, such as specific rate limits or Monday webhook behaviors. Majorly, the 'try it' functionality stands out, while the rest brings significant additional value.

In terms of productivity, the 'try it' functionality has definitely been the single biggest driver of productivity in our integration workflows. Before ReadMe, when onboarding a new engineer or outsourcing a particular feature to an external partner, we had to export a Postman collection, email it to them, and then guide them on how to set up environment variables, configure the headers, and what the input authorization keys are. If they made a simple formatting mistake, it resulted in a chain of Slack messages or we had to sit with them on Zoom calls and meetings to debug a basic payload. It was a friction-heavy process that took hours of coordination, and nothing at that point was self-service. We relied on how much the developers were picking up from what the senior developer was explaining.

After ReadMe, we simply send them the link to our ReadMe portal. The developer inputs their staging keys into the authorization field of the web page, fills out the payload parameters in a clean visual form, and then clicks 'try it.' The live response is displayed instantly side-by-side within the document. There is quite a boost in productivity impact. By moving the testing environment directly into the browser, we have eliminated the Postman setup entirely. We no longer have to dedicate time to teaching sessions by senior engineers during work hours whenever we have a new hire. The new hires can work on their own and self-diagnose their integration issues directly on the spot. Apart from this, having documentation helps because we also have a RAG system where we can feed in these documents and create a robust MCB layer that enables us to handle our LMS platform directly from an LLM web agent.

While ReadMe is highly effective, there are a few areas where we see room for improvement. As an engineering team, we prefer writing our documentation locally in Markdown within our code repositories. While ReadMe offers a CLI tool to sync files, the setup can sometimes be finicky. We need a more seamless, native GitHub integration that automatically syncs and previews pull requests.

The advanced customization constraints present another area for improvement. While basic styling is simple, deeper layouts and customization often require more advanced CSS scripts and overrides. This feels rigid and can break locally when ReadMe updates its core platform styling. We would love to see a more robust, low-code layout builder.

We could probably have more advanced analytics, multi-domain support, or something similar, and advanced access controls. These are locked behind higher enterprise pricing tiers, which can probably be reduced or made more accessible for a growing team like us. We are probably looking at a more flexible, modular pricing model, which would be beneficial.

I have been using ReadMe for close to two and a half years.

If you are an organization or company that is using a different documentation platform or a different testing platform for APIs, such as Postman, you can definitely look into using ReadMe. That would be quite interesting and provides a unified, single platform solution for all of it. The pricing is the reason I did not pick a perfect score. A rating of nine is chosen because the remaining features are amazing. I gave this product a rating of 9 out of 10.