Hostus vs Linktree:
a page you own against a page you rent

The short version. Linktree is faster to start and easier to edit on a phone. Hostus gives you a page on your own domain, with your own layout, that you can download and take anywhere. If the page is a temporary pointer, rent it. If it is the front door to your business, the difference compounds.

The single fact that decides most of this: Linktree does not sell a custom domain on any plan, including Premium at thirty five dollars a month. Their help centre says so directly and suggests a redirect instead.

At a glance

The domain question, which is really the whole question

Every piece of SEO advice about link in bio pages ends the same way: put it on your own domain, so the links people build point at you. Linktree cannot do that. Not on Starter, not on Pro, not on Premium at thirty five dollars a month. Their help centre says they do not offer the option to replace the linktr.ee URL and suggests a redirect, which does not solve it, because the destination Google sees is still theirs.

For comparison, inside the same category: Beacons sells a custom domain at ten dollars a month and Carrd at nineteen dollars a year.

Where Linktree is genuinely better

Three places, and they are not small.

• Starting. Five minutes against an evening. If you need a link in your bio before lunch, this is not a close call.
• Editing on a phone. Reordering rows in a dashboard beats editing HTML or re prompting an assistant, every time, on a bus.
• Selling without setting anything up. Linktree will take payment for a digital product on the free plan. It costs twelve percent, but it works today and Hostus does not sell for you at all.

And to be accurate about the reputation: Linktree sits at 4.0 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 7,133 reviews, 78 percent of them five star. The recurring complaints are real, the November 2025 price rise applied to existing subscribers, suspensions handled by chatbot, and the missing export, but they are a minority of a mostly satisfied base.

What we measured

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.

What the Hostus version looks like

This is the whole workflow. Paste it, answer the question it asks, host the file.

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.

Built with this prompt, hosted on the free plan: a restaurant, a coffee roastery, a tattoo studio. All fictional businesses, all illustrative numbers.

Who should pick which

Pick Linktree if the page is a pointer, you want it live today, you edit it from your phone more than once a week, or you want to sell a digital product without setting up a payment processor.

Pick Hostus if the page is the front door to a business, you want it on your own domain, you want it to look like your brand rather than like a link in bio tool, or you want the page to still exist as a file if either company changes its mind.

That last one is not hypothetical in this category. Linktree bought Koji and closed it in January 2024, bought Bento and deleted it in February 2026, and bought Fingertip, which closes in 2026.

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.