Skip to content

Micropage vs GitHub Pages, for a landing page you keep in git

GitHub Pages is the default answer for a developer who wants a site in a repo. It is free, it has been around for years, and your source is already on GitHub. If you have a Jekyll or Hugo site you like and it does what you need, keep it.

This post is for the narrower case: a landing page or a small product site, where you want the source in git, a form on the page, and as little build tooling as possible.

Where GitHub Pages wins

It is free. For a public repository on a free GitHub account, hosting costs nothing, custom domain included. Micropage needs Pro, $6/mo or $49/year, for a custom domain.

Any static site generator. Jekyll is built in. Hugo, Astro, Eleventy or anything else works through a GitHub Actions workflow. Micropage has one input format, .page, and one look per site that you adjust with colors and a few modifiers.

Bare domains. GitHub Pages can serve example.com directly. Micropage serves subdomains such as www.example.com, and the bare domain redirects to www.

Generous limits. GitHub’s limits page allows sites up to 1 GB and a soft 100 GB of bandwidth a month. A landing page will not get near either.

Where it gets awkward

There is no form handling. GitHub Pages serves static files. A contact form or a waitlist means a third-party form service, a serverless function, or a mailto link. On Micropage a form is three lines of the file, and submissions land in the editor:

form: waitlist
input: Email*
submit: Join

Spam filtering is included. CSV export and an email digest come with Pro; webhooks with Pro+. Turn on Newsletter for a form and it collects subscribers you can email from the same place.

You maintain the generator. A Jekyll site comes with a Ruby toolchain, a theme, a _config.yml and the plugins GitHub allows. A Hugo site comes with a pinned Hugo version and a theme you vendored three years ago. None of it is hard, but it is upkeep, and it is upkeep on a page you touch twice a year. A .page file has no dependencies: Micropage compiles it, and the CSS is generated for you.

Private repos cost money. GitHub Pages works on public repositories with GitHub Free. Publishing from a private repository needs GitHub Pro, Team or Enterprise.

Commercial sites. GitHub’s limits page says Pages is not meant to be “used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)”. Plenty of product landing pages live on GitHub Pages anyway. Read it and decide for yourself.

What stays the same

Both keep the source as text in a repository. With Micropage, the .page file lives in your repo, and micropage publish deploys it from the terminal on Pro. On Pro+, a deploy token lets GitHub Actions publish on every push, the same workflow you would use for Pages.

Both give you plain static HTML. On Micropage Pro you can download any build as a .zip and host it anywhere, GitHub Pages included. The source file is yours on every plan.

So which

Use GitHub Pages if the site has no forms, you like your generator, the repository can be public, and free matters. It is the better deal for documentation, a personal blog or a project page.

Use Micropage if the page needs a form or a waitlist, you would rather not maintain a generator and a theme, or an AI agent edits the site. The closed .page grammar is small enough that agents write it correctly, and the MCP server lets them publish.

Free publishes a real site on a micropage.sh subdomain, forms included, without a card. That is enough to see whether the format suits you.

Next steps