Most rankings in this category are written by the tools themselves. This one is organised around the questions that only matter after you have already committed: can the page carry your own domain, and can you take it with you when the tool changes its mind.
On those two, the answers are worse than the category admits. Linktree does not sell a custom domain on any plan, including the thirty five dollar Premium tier. And only one tool in this list, Carrd, will let you download the page you built.
The ranking
1. Hostus, if you want a real page that is yours
You describe the page to Claude or ChatGPT, it writes one HTML file, you drop the file into Hostus and you get a link. Your own domain, your own fonts, your own layout, and the file stays a file you can download. The free plan is 20 documents and 2 MB, which is about 140 pages the size of the ones we built for this article.
Pick something else if you want to reorder links from your phone in ten seconds without talking to an assistant. That is a real trade and we cover it below.
2. Linktree, if you want to be live in five minutes
It is the default for a reason: you are up in minutes, the free plan does not expire, and everyone already knows what the page will look like when they tap it. It is also the only tool here that will not sell you a custom domain at any price, takes 12 percent of a sale on the free plan, and has no way to export your links. Trustpilot has it at 4.0 out of 5 across 7,133 reviews, so the complaints are real but they are a minority of a mostly satisfied base.
3. Carrd, if you want design control for nineteen dollars a year
The honest one. Three sites free, meta tags at nineteen dollars a year, a canonical URL control that nobody else in this list exposes, and Download Sites at forty nine dollars a year, which makes it the only tool in the category with a real export. If you want a builder rather than a prompt, this is the one we would send you to.
4. Beacons, if you sell digital products
Storefront, media kit, and a custom domain at ten dollars a month, which is the cheapest monthly custom domain here. Note that Beacons contradicts itself on its own homepage: the headline says no platform fees on the free plan and the free plan's own feature list on the same page says nine percent seller fees. The comparison grid agrees with the nine percent.
5. Lnk.Bio, if you want to pay once and stop thinking about it
Ninety nine cents a month, or nine dollars and ninety nine cents one time for life. Favicon, OG image, SEO title and meta description are all there. The custom domain is a paid add on and the price we found was inconsistent between sources, so check it at signup.
6. Campsite.bio, if you want cheap analytics
Seven dollars a month, unlimited links free, CSV export on Pro. SEO and UTM settings are locked to Pro Plus. It was sold through Acquire.com in late 2023 and went through a stretch of unreachable support and DNS failure in 2024. It is fully live now, but it belongs in the same conversation as the shutdowns below.
7. Milkshake, if you build everything on your phone
The editor is a mobile app, which is either the point or a dealbreaker. Two ninety nine a month for Lite. The custom domain is Pro Plus only, at a hundred dollars a year.
8. Stan Store, if your whole business is digital products
No free plan, fourteen day trial, twenty nine dollars a month, and zero percent on sales. If you are running courses at volume, the zero percent pays for itself. If you just need five links, it is the most expensive way to get them.
9. AllMyLinks, if you refuse to pay anything
Free is the only plan. No ads, no upsell, no paid tier at all. The branding does not come off and there are no SEO controls to speak of. It does exactly what it says.
10. Bitly, if you already live in Bitly
Five links a month on free, ten dollars a month billed annually for Core, and the custom domain sits up at twenty nine dollars a month on Growth. Worth it only if the link shortener is already your system of record.
The comparison, in one table
| Tool | Free plan | Cheapest paid | Custom domain | Own the file |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostus | 20 docs, 2 MB | $9.99/mo, $49.99/yr | Yes | Yes, plain HTML |
| Linktree | Yes, with its badge | about $8/mo | No, on any plan | No |
| Carrd | 3 sites | $9/yr | $19/yr | Yes, $49/yr |
| Beacons | Yes, 9% on sales | $10/mo | $10/mo | No |
| Lnk.Bio | Unlimited links | $0.99/mo, or $9.99 once | Paid add on | No |
| Campsite.bio | Yes, 14 day analytics | $7/mo | Pro and up | No |
| Milkshake | Yes, phone only editor | $2.99/mo | $99.99/yr | No |
| Stan Store | No, 14 day trial | $29/mo | Not verified | No |
| AllMyLinks | Yes, the only plan | No paid tier | Likely none | No |
| Bitly | 5 links a month | $10/mo, annual only | $29/mo | No |
Prices checked at the source on 2026 09 08. Two vendors, Linktree and Taplink, price by region and publish no global dollar figure, so their numbers move depending on where you load the page from.
The thing nobody puts in the table
Between January 2024 and October 2026, this category buried six products.
| Product | What happened | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Koji | Bought by Linktree, then shut down. It had raised $36M and served over 700,000 creators. Users were offered three months of Linktree Pro. No data migration tool was documented. | 31 Jan 2024 |
| Snipfeed | Bought by Planoly, folded into Creator Store. snipfeed.co now redirects to planoly.store. | Apr 2024 |
| Shopify Linkpop | Shut down by Shopify with no reason given. Old pages stay up, frozen, and can no longer sell. | 7 Jul 2025 |
| Bento | Bought by Linktree, ran about two and a half years, shut down and the data deleted. bento.me now redirects to linktr.ee. | 13 Feb 2026 |
| Fingertip | Bought by Linktree in November 2025, closing. | May 2026 |
| Tap.bio | Closing. New signups already blocked, accounts and pages deleted on the date, and no export tool promised. Users are pointed at a third party with a discount code, which is a referral, not a migration. | 31 Oct 2026 |
Three of those six were bought by Linktree. That is not an accusation, it is the shape of the market: the leader consolidates, and the page you built on the thing it bought stops existing. The only defence that survives an acquisition is a page you can download and a domain that is yours.
How the top pick actually works
There is no builder to learn. You paste this into Claude or ChatGPT, answer the one clarifying question it comes back with, and you get a finished HTML file. Then you drop the file into Hostus and it has a link.
Build a single HTML page to use as the link in my Instagram bio, replacing my Linktree.
MY LINKS (paste what you have, in this priority order):
- Current Linktree or bio page: [url]
- Website: [url]
- Instagram: [url]
- Google Business Profile (listing or search): [url, or business name + city]
- Anything else I want on the page: [url] - [url]
Leave anything blank and skip it.
WHAT TO DO FIRST
1. Read all of it. From the website, take the visual identity: fonts and colors in hex, and the logo. From the Linktree, take the existing links and their titles. From Google, take the rating, the number of reviews, the address and two or three short quotes. From Instagram, take the handle and the tone of voice.
2. Before building, show me in one short message: the palette (five or six colors, each with the job it does), the font you picked (use the site's font if it is on Google Fonts, otherwise the closest match), and the list of links in the order you propose, each with a title and a one line subtitle. The first link is the main call to action and gets the emphasis. Ask me if that is right and only build after I confirm.
3. Then build the page.
PAGE RULES
- Mobile first: one column, about 440px max, centred, large tap targets, iPhone safe area
- One file, no dependencies beyond Google Fonts, icons as inline SVG, logo embedded as base64
- Pick the structure, do not assume it. Tell me in step 2 which shape you chose and why. A roastery and a tattoo studio should not come out with the same skeleton in different colours
- The identity block has to establish who this is within one screen. A circular logo above the name is one way. A full bleed image with the name over it, a typographic lockup with no logo at all, or a wordmark on its own line are others. Choose from what the brand already looks like
- Then one block that makes the business concrete. Choose the form from what the business actually is:
a number that genuinely matters, counting up from zero, with bars for the supporting figures
what is available right now, as a list: today's dishes, the coffees on the shelf, the next three open slots
the work itself, as a grid: pieces, rooms, past jobs
a process in three steps, or a short before and after
Pick one and commit to it. Do not stack all four
- If there is a Google Business Profile: a location block with the rating, stars, "X reviews on Google" linking to the listing, two or three reviews fading slowly from one to the next, and two buttons, book or contact, and directions
- Links: a stack of icon cards is one option, and it is the most common one, which is a reason to consider the others first. A numbered index, a compact text list with rules between the items, or a two column grid of tiles can all read better depending on the business. Whatever form you choose, the first link is the main action and gets the emphasis, and every target is comfortable to tap
- Motion stays subtle: one cascade on load of about 1.5 seconds, a periodic glow on the main call to action, one or two blurred shapes in the brand color drifting in the background, and everything static under prefers-reduced-motion
- OG meta tags and a favicon from the logo. WhatsApp links open with the message already filled in
- Calm, direct copy. No exclamation marks and no emoji
- Before you hand it over, render it at 390px wide and check the line breaks, the contrast and every link
Give me the finished .html file, ready to host.Three pages built with exactly this prompt, all on the free plan, all one file each:
- Northbank Kitchen, a twenty seat restaurant
- Cardinal Coffee Roasters, a small batch roastery
- Atelier Ink, a tattoo studio taking bookings
All three are fictional businesses, and every number and quote on them is illustrative. They exist so you can see what the prompt produces before you spend an evening on your own.
What we measured
| Measured on 2026 09 08 | The four pages from this prompt | The Linktree page for the same business |
|---|---|---|
| Network requests | 2 to 5 | 72 |
| Hosts contacted | 1 to 2 | 6 |
| Script tags in the DOM | 0 or 1 | 56 |
| DOM nodes | 100 to 129 | 1,087 |
Method. Chrome, PerformanceResourceTiming plus a DOM count, on a real
restaurant profile and on each of the four demo pages linked from this article, which is why
our side is a range. We are not publishing a byte comparison: per resource
sizes come back as zero for cross origin responses because of Timing Allow Origin, so any weight number
you see quoted in this category is either guessed or unmeasured. Requests, hosts, script tags and DOM
nodes are all directly observable, so those are what we report.
One of the six hosts on the Linktree page is edge.browser-fp.production.linktr.ee.
Two things you will read elsewhere that are not true
"Linktree pages are invisible to Google." They are not. We pulled four populated profiles with JavaScript never executed and got a self referencing canonical, a meta description, full og: tags and over a hundred real anchor elements in the raw HTML. Their robots.txt explicitly allows Googlebot and Bingbot. Anyone telling you otherwise has not checked.
The honest SEO argument is narrower and holds up better: the title and description are auto generated and generic, editing them requires Pro or above, and because there is no custom domain at any price, every link anyone ever builds to your page is authority going to linktr.ee.
"Linktree has terrible reviews." It has 4.0 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 7,133 reviews, 78 percent of them five star. The recurring complaints, price rises applied to existing subscribers in November 2025, account suspensions with chatbot only support, and no way to export your links, are real. They are also a minority report, and saying otherwise just makes the rest of the page easier to dismiss.
Good to know before you switch
Hostus is not a link in bio builder with a dashboard of draggable rows. The loop is: you describe the page to Claude or ChatGPT, you get one HTML file, you drop it into Hostus and you get a link. Changing a link later means editing the page in the inline editor or asking the assistant again, not dragging a row up two places on your phone. If reordering links in ten seconds from a bus is the job, Linktree does that better and we would rather you knew that now.
The free plan is 20 documents and 2 MB of HTML. A page like the ones above sits at about 14 KB, so the ceiling is real but far away. There is no click count per individual link either: Hostus reports which sections of a page were actually read, which answers a different question.