showdownjs/showdown

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

14869 stars · 1566 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Showdown is a bidirectional Markdown to HTML (and HTML to Markdown) converter library written in JavaScript. It runs both client-side in the browser and server-side in Node.js, supporting Markdown flavors like GFM.

Use cases

• convert markdown to html in the browser
• render user-submitted markdown comments as html
• convert html back to markdown
• parse markdown files in node.js
• add a markdown editor preview to a web app
• support gfm extensions like tables and task lists

When to choose

• you need a pure-JavaScript markdown converter with no native dependencies
• you need both markdown-to-html and html-to-markdown conversion
• you need the same parser to work in the browser and on the server
• you need GFM flavor support or custom extensions

When to avoid

• you need extremely high-performance parsing of huge documents
• you need full CommonMark spec compliance with strict conformance
• you are rendering untrusted markdown and need built-in sanitization (pair it with a sanitizer)
• your stack is not JavaScript

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser markdown serialization web-development frontend developer-tools documentation browser cross-platform markdown-to-html html-to-markdown gfm bidirectional-converter text-processing nodejs javascript

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="showdownjs/showdown")