GitHub Pages vs Read the Docs

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

GitHub Pages

17K
12.4K
+ 1
1.1K
Read the Docs

69
281
+ 1
22
Add tool

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

GitHub Pages: Public webpages freely hosted and easily published. Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live; Read the Docs: Create, host, and browse documentation. Read the Docs 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. We support webhooks so your docs get built when you commit code. There's also support for versioning so you can build docs from tags and branches of your code in your repository.

GitHub Pages can be classified as a tool in the "Static Web Hosting" category, while Read the Docs is grouped under "Documentation as a Service & Tools".

Some of the features offered by GitHub Pages are:

  • Blogging with Jekyll
  • Custom URLs
  • Automatic Page Generator

On the other hand, Read the Docs provides the following key features:

  • Github and Bitbucket Integration
  • Auto-updating
  • Internationalization

"Free" is the top reason why over 283 developers like GitHub Pages, while over 10 developers mention "GitHub integration" as the leading cause for choosing Read the Docs.

Read the Docs is an open source tool with 5.25K GitHub stars and 2.87K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Read the Docs's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, GitHub Pages has a broader approval, being mentioned in 576 company stacks & 683 developers stacks; compared to Read the Docs, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

Decisions about GitHub Pages and Read the Docs
Howie Zhao
Full Stack Engineer at yintrust · | 7 upvotes · 199.6K views

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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Pros of GitHub Pages
Pros of Read the Docs
  • 290
    Free
  • 217
    Right out of github
  • 185
    Quick to set up
  • 108
    Instant
  • 107
    Easy to learn
  • 58
    Great way of setting up your project's website
  • 47
    Widely used
  • 41
    Quick and easy
  • 37
    Great documentation
  • 4
    Super easy
  • 3
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Instant and fast Jekyll builds
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Great integration
  • 13
    GitHub integration
  • 7
    Free for public repos
  • 2
    Automated Builds

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of GitHub Pages
Cons of Read the Docs
  • 4
    Not possible to perform HTTP redirects
  • 3
    Supports only Jekyll
  • 3
    Limited Jekyll plugins
  • 1
    Jekyll is bloated
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is GitHub Pages?

    Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

    What is Read the Docs?

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use GitHub Pages?
    What companies use Read the Docs?
    See which teams inside your own company are using GitHub Pages or Read the Docs.
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with GitHub Pages?
    What tools integrate with Read the Docs?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    What are some alternatives to GitHub Pages and Read the Docs?
    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.
    GitLab Pages
    Host your static websites on GitLab.com for free, or on your own GitLab Enterprise Edition instance. Use any static website generator: Jekyll, Middleman, Hexo, Hugo, Pelican, and more
    Amazon S3
    Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
    Medium
    Medium is a different kind of place on the internet. A place where the measure of success isn’t views, but viewpoints. Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications. A place where conversation pushes ideas forward.
    WordPress
    The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
    See all alternatives