These are some things that you can do with our Pages tier FREE, that you cannot do with GH Pages:
- We don't restrict people to only one static site generator, like Jekyll. You have use whatever with our Continuous Deployment.
- Automatic rollbacks at the CDN level. If you push a broken site, you don't need to stress about fixing the issue, pushing again, and waiting until the changes are published again. We have a big button that says "Rollback". Clicking that, our CDN automatically purges your site and promotes the good version you want. After that, you can spend as much time as you want writing a proper fix.
- Automatic provisioning and renewals of Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains. If you have a custom domain, we do that for you, you don't have to worry about anything.
- Free custom domains, you have to have a paid subscription with GitHub if you want to use your own domain.
As I said again, those things are FREE with our initial plan, $0.
Edit: I know the parent comments are comparing to Github. I thought that it would be useful to let people know about Gitlab's offering.
It appears Gitlab provides support for custom domains on their hosted Gitlab solution as well as support for different site generators via their Gitlab CI solution. It is probably not as easy to use as Netlify though.
I love Gitlab and use it for all my projects, I should try their Pages at some point (although I don't use GH pages either, it was just the offering I was more familiar with from hearing about it).
EDIT: Just tried it, I can't believe how easy it was. Literally just add a CI task that outputs a "pages" artifact.
I see, thank you for your answers! To be honest, I don't think it's worth the price for me when I can get a server for $5 and push as many sites as I want, but a friend of mine loves you, so you must be doing something right!
Also, as other commented have said, you don't need a paid account to publish with GitHub pages, and it doesn't restrict you to one generator either, it will happily publish whatever HTML.
Impressive features. I think there is room for multiple static site solutions and there is a lot more to do. Sites likes https://www.penflip.com/ are also based on git but make it easier to use, something I'm sure Netlify is also looking at.
These are some things that you can do with our Pages tier FREE, that you cannot do with GH Pages:
- We don't restrict people to only one static site generator, like Jekyll. You have use whatever with our Continuous Deployment.
- Automatic rollbacks at the CDN level. If you push a broken site, you don't need to stress about fixing the issue, pushing again, and waiting until the changes are published again. We have a big button that says "Rollback". Clicking that, our CDN automatically purges your site and promotes the good version you want. After that, you can spend as much time as you want writing a proper fix.
- Deploy Previews for Pull Requests hosted live. We build each pull request and put it in a subdomain so you can collaborate building sites much easily. Blog post announcement: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy-p...
- Automatic provisioning and renewals of Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains. If you have a custom domain, we do that for you, you don't have to worry about anything.
- Free custom domains, you have to have a paid subscription with GitHub if you want to use your own domain.
As I said again, those things are FREE with our initial plan, $0.
Happy to answer more questions if you have more.