Read the Docs vs. Vercel comparison

Vercel is fantastic for deploying frontend frameworks and modern web applications. However, when it comes to technical documentation and developer-focused content, Read the Docs is the purpose-built solution.

Publish on a platform trusted by engineering teams at AMD and Canonical, and by open source projects like Jupyter and Flask — over 15 years of reliable documentation hosting.

No per-seat pricing. Business and Enterprise plans for commercial teams, with a free Community tier for open source.


Build your site on the cloud Generate your site's content on the cloud
Deploy previews Solve style issues before deploying
Static hosting Publish any static content
Custom 404 pages Style 404 pages with context-related information
Redirects Redirect users to the right page
Custom theme Style the documentation as you like
Documentation tool agnostic Use the documentation tool your team prefers (Sphinx, MkDocs, Docusaurus, etc)
Page analytics Understand how people browse your documentation
Advanced collaboration Unlimited users
Search Always find what you are looking for
Multiple versions Publish multiple versions of your documentation
Translations Serve translated versions of your docs
Visual diff on deploy previews Visualize differences directly on the rendered version
Search analytics Explore what people search for in your docs
Private documentation Give access only to trusted people
Unlimited builds per month Trigger as many builds as you need
Open Source No lock in and contribute back

Try it out

.readthedocs.yaml

# Example for a Node-based doc tool (e.g. Docusaurus).
# Replace the install/build commands with whatever your tool uses
# (mkdocs build, sphinx-build, jupyter-book build, etc).
version: 2

build:
  os: ubuntu-24.04
  tools:
    nodejs: "20"

  commands:
    # Install dependencies and build the site
    - cd docs/ && npm install
    - cd docs/ && npm run build
    # Copy output to Read the Docs
    - mkdir -p $READTHEDOCS_OUTPUT/html/
    - cp -r docs/build/* $READTHEDOCS_OUTPUT/html/

Documentation needs search, versioning, translations, and analytics out of the box. Read the Docs provides all of that on a platform built specifically for technical docs.

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Read the Docs is purpose-built for your documentation

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