You're choosing between Netlify and GitHub Pages. The answer depends on one thing: what you're building and whether you ever plan to make money from it.
GitHub Pages prohibits commercial use. Netlify doesn't. That one fact changes the calculus for a lot of projects. Here's the full breakdown.
Quick verdict
GitHub Pages wins for: personal sites, open-source project docs, developer portfolios, and anything where you want a completely free, zero-configuration host with generous bandwidth.
Netlify wins for: anything with a build pipeline, client sites, commercial projects, and workflows where deploy previews and form handling matter.
At a glance
| Feature | Netlify (Free) | GitHub Pages |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (credit-limited) | Free |
| Bandwidth | ~30GB/mo | 100GB/mo (soft limit) |
| Storage | Not specified | 1GB |
| Custom domain | Yes | Yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
| Build pipeline | Yes (300 credits/mo) | Yes (10 builds/hour) |
| Commercial use | Yes | No |
| Deploy previews | Yes | No |
| Form handling | Yes (paid features) | No |
| CDN | Global | GitHub's CDN |
Where Netlify wins
Build pipelines. Netlify was built for CI/CD. Connect your repo, push a change, and a new version of your site deploys automatically. It handles static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Next.js, Eleventy) with no configuration required.
Deploy previews. Every pull request on Netlify gets its own preview URL. You can share it with a client or teammate before merging. This is genuinely useful for agency work. GitHub Pages has no equivalent.
Commercial projects. Netlify's terms allow you to host commercial sites, client work, and anything you're charging for. GitHub Pages explicitly prohibits e-commerce, SaaS, and commercial transactions.
Edge functions and forms. Netlify has built-in form handling (Netlify Forms), edge functions, and identity features. GitHub Pages is static hosting only. No server-side logic, no forms without a third-party service.
Where GitHub Pages wins
Bandwidth. This is the one that surprises people. GitHub Pages has a 100GB/month soft bandwidth limit, which covers nearly every personal or open-source project. Netlify's free tier now uses a credit system: 300 credits per month, with bandwidth costing 10 credits per GB. That's roughly 30GB of free bandwidth before you hit limits. For a site with real traffic, GitHub Pages is more generous on the free tier.
Simplicity. If your site is already in a GitHub repo, Pages takes about 90 seconds to set up. No account on a separate service, no build configuration, no new learning curve. Enable it in repo settings, pick a branch, and it's live.
Open source projects. GitHub Pages is the default home for open-source documentation for a reason. The integration with GitHub repos, Issues, and PRs is native. The .github.io subdomain is recognizable and trusted in developer communities.
No credit system. Netlify's shift to credits in 2024 made the free tier harder to reason about. You're not tracking just bandwidth. You're tracking production deploys (15 credits each), function invocations, and form submissions as separate credit buckets. GitHub Pages is just: free.
Pricing breakdown
GitHub Pages: Free. Always. For the use cases it supports.
Netlify:
- Free: 300 credits/month. A production deploy costs 15 credits, bandwidth costs 10 credits/GB. Roughly 20 production deploys and 30GB bandwidth before you hit limits.
- Personal: $9/month for 1,000 credits/month and priority support.
- Pro: $20/member/month for 3,000 credits/month, 3 concurrent builds, and team features.
Pricing as of March 2026. Verify current plans at netlify.com/pricing.
Who should use each
Use GitHub Pages if:
- Your site is a personal project, portfolio, or open-source documentation
- You want the simplest possible setup
- You need more than 30GB/month bandwidth on a free tier
- Your content is already in a GitHub repository
Use Netlify if:
- You're building something commercial
- You need deploy previews for client review
- Your build process uses a static site generator
- You're working on a team and need shared environment variables and concurrent builds
The honest take
For most individual developers and open-source projects, GitHub Pages is the better free option. More bandwidth, simpler setup, and native GitHub integration. The only reasons to leave are the commercial use restriction or a need for build pipeline features.
For anything you're shipping to clients or charging for, Netlify is the clear choice. Its free tier is more limited than it was before the credit model, but the tooling, deploy previews, and commercial-friendly terms make it worth paying for if you're doing real work.
If you're evaluating more options, the full static site hosting comparison covers Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, and more alongside both of these.
For the fastest way to get a single HTML file live without either platform, hosting an HTML file online for free covers the instant publishing options.