Home / Compare / htmldrop vs Neocities
Neocities is a much-loved free host for personal websites — a place to build a homepage in the spirit of the old GeoCities and tend it over time inside a friendly creative community. htmldrop is built for the opposite moment: you have one HTML file and you want a live link right now. No account, no site to maintain — drop the file and share the URL in seconds.
Try htmldrop free — no signup| htmldrop | Neocities | |
|---|---|---|
| Publish without an account | Yes — anonymous drops | Account required |
| Time to a live URL | Seconds | Sign up, then build your site |
| Anonymous, expiring option | Yes — live 7 days, no email | Sites are tied to your account |
| Password-protect a page | Yes — from $5/mo | Built for public personal sites |
| Custom domain | Yes — from $10/mo | Yes |
| Publish from an AI agent (MCP) | Yes — MCP + REST API | No |
| Best for | Sharing a file, fast | A personal homepage you tend |
Neocities feature availability and plan details are theirs and can change — check neocities.org for current specifics.
You have a single HTML or Markdown file and want a link now — an artifact, a one-pager, a quick demo, a proof of concept, a page you generated with an AI assistant — without registering, choosing a site name, or committing to something you'll maintain. Drops are throwaway-to-permanent on your terms: start with a free anonymous drop that lives 7 days, and if it turns out you want to keep it, sign in or upgrade to make it permanent. You can also keep pages private with unguessable URLs or add a password. The point is speed and low commitment — you're sharing a file, not launching and tending a website.
You want a persistent personal homepage — a place that's yours, that you'll add to and shape over time, with a name people can visit and return to. Neocities is also about belonging to a creative community of hand-made websites, celebrating the open, personal web in the spirit of the old GeoCities, and it offers a genuinely free forever home for a site you tend. If a homepage with an address, an identity, and a community is the project you have in mind, Neocities is the better choice — and htmldrop isn't trying to replace it.
Neocities hands you an account and a site. You sign up, choose a name, and get an address with a file manager and editor built in to fill it — on the free tier, one site per account. It's meant to be lived in: you upload pages and images, edit them in place, and over time the address becomes an identity people can follow, link to, and stumble across through the browse directory or a webring. Sites there are public because being browsed is the point. Updating yours means going back inside it and changing files.
htmldrop has no site. Each drop is an independent artifact with its own URL — drag a file in, copy the link, done. There's no homepage to arrange, no name to choose and then live with, and no relationship between one drop and the next: twenty drops are twenty unrelated links, not twenty pages of a website. Re-upload and the URL stays the same, with version history on paid plans when the new version was a mistake. That's a poor fit for a homepage and a very good one for the thing you finished ten minutes ago — see host an HTML file or get a URL for an HTML file for the whole flow.
This is the sharpest difference between the two, and it isn't about features. Neocities exists so that hand-made pages get found — followed, listed, ringed, wandered into. htmldrop defaults the other way: drops are not indexed by search engines unless you opt in per drop, URLs are unguessable rather than sequential, and paid plans add a password gate (Argon2id-hashed, with per-drop signed cookies). Neither default is better in the abstract; they're for different pages. A client preview, a quote, a draft, or an internal dashboard is exactly the page you don't want in a public directory. A generative sketch you'd love a stranger to find belongs somewhere built for browsing — though if you just want the sketch running on a link today, hosting a p5.js sketch takes about a minute here too.
Neocities is genuinely free for a personal site and offers a paid tier as well; those plans are theirs to define and they change, so check their site for current numbers rather than trusting a comparison page. What's worth saying plainly is that "free forever for a site you tend" is a real offer and htmldrop isn't trying to undercut it.
htmldrop's own numbers: anonymous drops are free with no account at all — up to 2 MB, live for 7 days. A free account adds 3 drops at 10 MB each. Paid tiers are Plus $12/mo (or $99/yr) buys permanence, your own custom domain, password protection, and version history; Business $49/mo raises uploads to 500 MB and adds team features. You're paying for permanence and the private-by-default posture, not for hosting bytes — and the tier most people actually use is the one that costs nothing and asks for nothing.
These are static files on both sides, so there's nothing proprietary to convert and no lock-in in either direction. To bring a page over, download it from your Neocities file manager (or use the copy on your own machine) and drag the file, folder, or .zip onto htmldrop.app; multi-file bundles want a free account. Keep index.html at the root and relative links keep working untouched.
Most people who use both don't migrate at all. The Neocities site stays the address — the thing with a name, a look, and visitors. htmldrop takes the pages that don't belong on it: a password-gated preview for a client, a draft you're not ready to have found, a one-off demo that should quietly disappear in a week. If you want to eyeball a file before either of them gets it, previewing an HTML file online is the fastest check.
Drag an .html file onto htmldrop.app and copy the slug.htmldrop.app URL — no account, no site to set up. Anonymous drops are free (up to 2 MB, live 7 days). A free account raises the limit to 10 MB, keeps your drops while you're logged in, and adds folder and .zip uploads. Paid plans from $5/mo make drops permanent and add more storage, version history, and password protection; Plus+ from $10/mo adds a custom domain. Prefer to automate it? Publish straight from the REST API or the MCP server so an AI assistant can put a page online for you.
Anonymous, no email, no credit card. In seconds you'll have a real link to send anywhere — keep it for a week or keep it forever.
Try it freehtmldrop is a good alternative when you just need a link for one HTML file and don't want to build and maintain a whole site. Neocities is designed around a personal site you tend over time behind an account; htmldrop skips that — drag the file onto htmldrop.app and the URL is live in seconds, no account required.
No. Anonymous drops need no signup — drop a file up to 2 MB in the browser and get a live URL immediately, live for 7 days. A free account keeps drops while you're logged in and raises the limit to 10 MB, and paid plans from $5/mo make them permanent.
No. Neocities is a wonderful home for a personal website and a creative community, and if that's what you want it's the better choice. htmldrop is built for the opposite job: getting one file online fast, on your terms, from throwaway to permanent.
No. Drops are not indexed by search engines unless you opt in per drop, there's no public directory or browse page, and URLs are unguessable rather than sequential. Paid plans from $5/mo add a password gate, hashed with Argon2id. Neocities works the other way round on purpose — sites there are meant to be browsed and found.
Yes — both host plain static files, so there's nothing proprietary to convert. Download the page from your Neocities file manager and drag the file, folder, or .zip onto htmldrop; multi-file bundles want a free account. Keep index.html at the root and relative links carry over unchanged.
That's the usual setup. Neocities stays your address — the site with a name and visitors — while htmldrop takes the pages that don't belong on it: a password-gated client preview, a draft you don't want found, a demo meant to disappear in a week. Nothing links the two, so there's no integration to set up.