Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the Material for MkDocs team¶
We are thrilled to announce Zensical, our next-gen static site generator designed to simplify the process of building documentation sites. Distilled from a decade of experience, Zensical is our effort to overcome the technical limitations of MkDocs, reaching far beyond its capabilities.
Zensical is the result of thousands of hours of work – built from the ground up for a modern and comfortable authoring experience, while making it easy for developers to extend and customize Zensical through its upcoming module system. Our goal is to support docs-as-code workflows with tens of thousands of pages, without compromising performance or usability.
To make the transition seamless, compatibility comes first. We're putting significant effort into ensuring a smooth migration from Material for MkDocs for all users. Zensical can natively read mkdocs.yml , allowing you to build your existing project with minimal changes. As of now, a subset of plugins is supported, and we're working on feature parity in the coming months.
Zensical is fully Open Source, licensed under MIT, and can be used for any purpose, including for commercial use. We're also saying goodbye to our sponsorware model, replacing it with our new offering for professional users: Zensical Spark. This allows us to stay independent, maximizing user value, as we shape the future of Zensical together with you.
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This is the second article in a four-part series:
Transforming Material for MkDocs Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the creators of Material for MkDocs. What happens to the features in Insiders coming November 11, 2025 A path forward for our community coming November 18, 2025
Since its initial release in 2016, Material for MkDocs has helped tens of thousands of teams to publish and maintain reliable documentation. However, in recent years, it has become apparent that we were running up against limitations of our core dependency, MkDocs. These limitations proved impossible to overcome as they are deeply rooted in its architecture.
We also mentioned in our update on our foundational work that MkDocs must be considered a supply chain risk, since it's unmaintained since August 2024. It has seen no releases in over a year and is accumulating unresolved issues and pull requests. These developments have forced us to cut our ties to MkDocs as a dependency.
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