GitHub Pages vs Read the Docs

Overview

Read the Docs

Stacks72

Followers289

Votes22

GitHub Pages

Stacks17.7K

Followers13.0K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Pages vs Read the Docs: What are the differences?

Introduction:

GitHub Pages and Read the Docs are both popular platforms used for hosting documentation websites. They have some key differences in terms of features and functionality. In this Markdown code, I will provide a concise comparison between GitHub Pages and Read the Docs.

1. Customization: GitHub Pages offers a higher level of customization compared to Read the Docs. With GitHub Pages, you have more control over the design and layout of your documentation website. You can easily modify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to match your branding and styling preferences. On the other hand, Read the Docs provides a more standardized layout and design, limiting the customization options available.

2. Hosting Options: GitHub Pages is specifically designed for hosting static websites, including documentation. It seamlessly integrates with your GitHub repository, allowing you to easily publish and update your documentation with every commit. Read the Docs, on the other hand, is a dedicated platform for hosting documentation and provides additional features such as API documentation and versioning support. It supports hosting both static and dynamic documentation websites.

3. Collaboration Features: GitHub Pages provides robust collaboration features as it is part of the larger GitHub ecosystem. You can leverage the pull request workflow and easily collaborate with other contributors, making it an ideal choice for open-source projects. Read the Docs, while it also supports collaboration, does not offer the same level of built-in collaboration features as GitHub Pages. It primarily focuses on hosting and generating documentation.

4. Automatic Documentation Generation: Read the Docs has a distinct advantage when it comes to automatically generating documentation. It is designed to seamlessly integrate with popular documentation generators, such as Sphinx for Python projects. Read the Docs can automatically build and update documentation from the project's source code, making it an efficient option for projects with frequent documentation updates. GitHub Pages, on the other hand, requires manual generation and deployment of the documentation files.

5. Scalability: Both GitHub Pages and Read the Docs are scalable options for hosting documentation websites. However, Read the Docs is well-suited for large and complex projects with multiple versions and API documentation. It provides features like versioning and automatic linking between different versions, making navigation between versions easier for users. While GitHub Pages can handle considerable traffic and documentation, it might require additional customization to efficiently handle complex projects.

6. Documentation Hosting Platform: Read the Docs is a dedicated documentation hosting platform, specifically designed to host and generate documentation. It offers additional features like search functionality, support for multiple programming languages, and translations. GitHub Pages is primarily a code hosting platform that includes the option to host documentation websites. It provides stronger integration with the GitHub workflow, making it a seamless choice for projects that heavily rely on Git and GitHub.

In Summary, GitHub Pages provides more customization options, seamless integration with Git workflow, and excellent collaboration features; whereas, Read the Docs excels in automatic documentation generation, scalability for complex projects, and comprehensive documentation hosting platform.

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Advice on Read the Docs, GitHub Pages

Howie

Full Stack Engineer at Yintrust

Aug 13, 2020

Decidedon

Netlify

We use Netlify to host static websites.

The reasons for choosing Netlify over GitHub Pages are as follows:

Netfily can bind multiple domain names, while GitHub Pages can only bind one domain name
With Netfily, the original repository can be private, while GitHub Pages free tier requires the original repository to be public

In addition, in order to use CDN, we use Netlify DNS.

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Detailed Comparison

Read the Docs	GitHub Pages
It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.	Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.
Github and Bitbucket Integration;Auto-updating;Internationalization;Canonical URLs; Versions;Version Control Support Matrix;PDF Generation;Search;Alternate Domains	Blogging with Jekyll; Custom URLs; Automatic Page Generator
Statistics
Stacks 72	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 289	Followers 13.0K
Votes 22	Votes 1.1K
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 GitHub integration 7 Free for public repos 2 Automated Builds	Pros 290 Free 217 Right out of github 185 Quick to set up 108 Instant 107 Easy to learn Cons 4 Not possible to perform HTTP redirects 3 Limited Jekyll plugins 3 Supports only Jekyll 1 Jekyll is bloated
Integrations
GitHub Bitbucket Evernote Dropbox	GitHub

What are some alternatives to Read the Docs, GitHub Pages?

Postman

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

DomainRacer

It is a blazing fast hosting solution that provides Customer Satisfaction driven Web Hosting services since 2016.

Netlify

Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Vercel

A cloud platform for serverless deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Surge

Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!

Divshot

Divshot makes building and hosting front-end web applications simple. Build locally and deploy using a simple command-line interface. Divshot supports multiple environments, pushState routing, atomic deploys, and more.

Related Comparisons

GitHub Pages vs Read the Docs: What are the differences?

Introduction:

GitHub Pages vs Read the Docs

Overview