Picking the right tool for design system documentation comes down to your team's size, how technical your contributors are, and how complex the system itself is. There's no single right answer, but a few tools keep coming up for good reasons.

Storybook is probably the most widely used, especially on teams where developers take the lead. It lets you build and display UI components in isolation, with interactive controls, accessibility testing, and support for React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte.

Zeroheight is built specifically for design system documentation and does a decent job of connecting the design and dev sides. It pulls directly from Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD and lets you put live components, code snippets, and design assets on the same page.

Notion and Confluence aren't glamorous choices, but they work well for the less technical parts: governance policies, contribution guides, decision logs. Teams already living in one of those tools often find it easier to keep documentation there than to maintain a separate platform.

Supernova is newer and worth watching if you're dealing with multi-brand systems or need to auto-sync design tokens from Figma and export developer-ready code. It's more setup than the others but handles enterprise complexity better than most.

Readme and Gitbook suit teams that want a developer-friendly documentation site with Markdown support, versioning, and clean navigation.

Custom-built sites using Next.js, Gatsby, or Docusaurus give you full control. Google's Material Design and Salesforce's Lightning Design System both went this route, tightly integrating specs, live demos, and code examples in ways off-the-shelf tools can't quite match.

Before committing to anything, check whether it handles versioning, search, accessibility, and connections to your existing Figma files or code repos. Honestly though, the most important question is simpler: will your team actually keep it updated? Outdated documentation causes more confusion than having none at all.