API / Swagger Interview questions
What is the difference between OpenAPI Generator and the legacy Swagger Codegen?
OpenAPI Generator is a community-driven fork of the original Swagger Codegen project, created after disagreements over release cadence and OpenAPI 3.0 support timelines within the original project's governance, and it has since become the more actively maintained and widely adopted of the two.
| Swagger Codegen | OpenAPI Generator |
| Original project, maintained under SmartBear's governance. | Community fork, independently governed. |
| Historically slower to add full OpenAPI 3.x support. | Faster-moving OpenAPI 3.x feature adoption. |
| Smaller set of actively maintained language generators. | Broader, more actively maintained set of language/framework generators. |
| Still used, particularly in some legacy pipelines. | Generally the more commonly recommended choice today. |
Since both tools share the same conceptual origin, the command-line interface and templating approach feel broadly similar; the practical decision for a new project usually comes down to picking OpenAPI Generator by default, unless a specific existing pipeline or generator plugin has a hard dependency on the original Swagger Codegen specifically.
How did OpenAPI Generator originate?
Which tool is generally the more commonly recommended choice today?
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