Linktree alternatives for developers: what actually fits a portfolio of shipped apps
Search for a way to list everything you have built and you land in link-in-bio tools: Linktree, Bio.link, Beacons, Carrd and the rest. They are good at the job they were designed for. That job is probably not yours, and it is worth being precise about why before you pick one.
By Utkarsh Kushwaha · Published
What link-in-bio tools are actually for
They solve a specific constraint: a social platform gives you one link in your profile, and you have more than one thing to point at. The tool provides a page that holds the list, and you put that page in the one slot.
Everything about the category follows from that constraint. The page is the product. It is optimised to be a destination someone arrives at from a bio, usually on a phone, usually once. Analytics count visits to that page. The design vocabulary is buttons stacked vertically, because that is what works for a follower tapping through from Instagram.
If you are a creator whose audience lives on a social platform, this is exactly right and you should use one.
Why it fits a developer's portfolio badly
A developer with four shipped products has a different asset and a different problem. The asset is not a follower count on one platform. It is traffic arriving at four separate deployed websites, from search, from a launch, from a link in a forum. The problem is not one link slot. It is that those four sites are strangers to each other.
A link-in-bio page does nothing about that. It is somewhere else. For it to help, the visitor already has to be looking at your profile, which means the visitor is already someone who knows who you are, which is the audience you are trying to build, not the one you have.
The concrete gap: someone lands on your third project from a Google search, uses it, likes it, and leaves. That person is the highest-intent visitor you will get all week, and a bio page on another domain never enters the story. Nothing they can see mentions that you have built anything else.
The three things a developer needs that the category does not do
It has to live on the products, not beside them. The list has to appear on the site the visitor is already on, at the moment they already like it. That is an embed on your own domains, not a page on someone else's.
It has to be safe to embed. Something loading on every page of everything you have shipped is a liability the moment it is heavy, sets cookies, injects styles into your CSS, or shifts your layout. Style isolation and a failure mode of rendering nothing at all are not niceties here; they are the reason it is allowed on a real product.
It has to be permanent. You are pasting it into codebases you will not open again for a year. If the tool changes its pricing, gets acquired, or switches off a free tier, the thing you are left with is a dead widget in four repositories. A one-time price and a script that fails silently is a much smaller bet than a subscription with an off switch.
The options, honestly
Linktree and the other hosted bio pages. Best-in-class at being a bio destination, with the polish and the templates to match. Free tier that works. Not designed to be embedded in your own products, and the analytics answer 'who visited my links page', not 'which of my sites sends people to the others'.
Carrd or a hand-built one-pager. Cheap, yours, no lock-in, and you can make it look exactly right. Still a separate destination, and still one more site to maintain, which, if you already struggle to keep four footers current, is the wrong direction.
A shared footer component. The correct answer if all your projects live in one monorepo with one deploy. Free and completely under your control. Falls apart across four repos in three frameworks, which is what most portfolios actually are.
An embedded badge that reads a hosted list. One line per site, one place to edit, changes propagate everywhere without touching a repo. This is the shape that matches the problem, and it is what this site sells, which you should weigh accordingly. It is worth it from your second shipped app and pointless with one.
How to choose in one question
Where is your traffic? If it arrives at a social profile, you want a bio page, and a good free one exists. If it arrives at deployed websites you own, you want the list on those websites, because that is where the people already are, and it is the only placement that keeps working while you are asleep.
Plenty of people need both. They do not compete: the bio page catches the follower, the embed catches the user. The mistake is buying the first when your traffic is entirely the second.
Questions people ask about this
Is Linktree bad for SEO?
It is neutral for the page itself and irrelevant to your products, a bio page on someone else's domain passes essentially nothing to your sites and does not help them rank. If SEO is the goal, links between pages you own are worth considerably more.
Can I use a link-in-bio page and an embedded badge together?
Yes, and it is a sensible combination. They catch different people: the bio page catches somebody who found your profile, the embed catches somebody who found your product.
What is the cheapest option?
A hand-edited footer list is free and works until your third launch, at which point keeping it correct across every repo becomes the thing you stop doing. Cost per year is a bad way to compare these; whether it is still accurate in a year is the better one.
Where Make Taksh fits
Make Taksh is one line of code you paste into each site you own. It renders a small badge in the corner that lists everything you have shipped, reading from one hosted list, so adding your next project is one edit and every site you have already installed it on picks it up within minutes. It is under 8 KB, renders in a shadow root so it cannot touch your CSS, sets no cookies, and draws nothing at all if it fails to load.