License¶

Zensical is built on a simple principle: the core tools required to build and publish documentation should be Open Source, portable, and easy to adopt.

All of our Open Source projects are licensed under the MIT license, which gives individuals and organizations broad freedom to use modify, distribute, and build on them, including in commercial projects. The following Open Source projects are part of the Zensical ecosystem:

• Zensical - Our static site generator
• ZRX - The engine that is powering Zensical
• Mono - A tool we built to manage our mono repos

Zensical Studio¶

Zensical Studio is our professional authoring environment for Zensical and MkDocs-based projects. It brings IDE-grade support to documentation workflows, including validation, completions, navigation, syntax awareness, and other features that help technical writers and documentation teams move faster with confidence.

Zensical Studio is designed to complement the Open Source toolchain, not replace it. Your projects remain plain files, use open formats, and can still be built, hosted, and maintained without Zensical Studio. The product improves the authoring experience, but it never becomes a dependency of your published output.

Offering Zensical Studio commercially gives us a sustainable way to fund full-time development by a team of professionals with a decade-long track record in Open Source documentation tooling.

Our goal is to build a model that serves both users and the long-term health of the project: Open Source infrastructure at the core, optional commercial tooling around it, and no lock-in.

Since Zensical Studio is a commercial product, it is governed by its own End User License Agreement (EULA) rather than the MIT license used for Zensical. This keeps the terms for the commercial authoring product clear and separate from the Open Source toolchain. By using Zensical Studio, you agree to the terms of that EULA.