The OpenAI Codex Sites alternative for gated, account-free sharing.

Where Codex Sites genuinely fits

Codex Sites is strong, and worth conceding plainly. Invoked with @Sites inside Codex, it lets Codex create, save, deploy, and inspect full websites, web apps, dashboards, internal tools, and games hosted by OpenAI. It is backed by a real database (D1 for durable structured data) and object storage (R2 for files), and persistence is supported: every deployment URL is a production deployment. Codex writes the whole app, including server logic and the database, in one place.

The showcase makes the intended use obvious: onboarding hubs, enablement libraries, executive KPI dashboards, employee idea boards, launch calendars, event-ops hubs. These are internal team tools for people who are already inside your OpenAI workspace. If you live in Codex plus ChatGPT Enterprise and the audience is your own colleagues, especially for a data-backed dashboard, Codex Sites is an excellent fit and Stacktree does not replace it.

Availability moved: on July 9, 2026 Sites went GA as ChatGPT Sites for paid subscribers, with public publishing, and the docs have since added custom domains (where available, not in Enterprise workspaces at launch) and built-in analytics (unique visitors and page views). On 11 September 2026 OpenAI added named external viewers (a private Site can be shared with a specific person outside the workspace, who must sign in with the invited ChatGPT account), teammate editing, and database inspection, and reported over 5M sites created. The differences that remain are precise: gated viewing without a ChatGPT account (their non-public modes still require a signed-in, invited viewer; no passcode, no email-domain gate, no link-only private mode), expiry, and publishing by API/MCP rather than in a chat. Region is no longer one of them: the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK were excluded at launch, lifted on 20 July 2026 for Plus and Pro. The full arc from workspace-only beta to public GA is in our Codex Sites explainer; the public-link history is in the availability post.

Where Stacktree differs

The sharpest documented difference is now the space between public and signed-in invited accounts. A ChatGPT Site is either published to the whole internet or restricted to signed-in, invited viewers; since September 2026 those viewers can be named people outside your workspace, but the link alone opens nothing unless they are signed in with the invited ChatGPT account, and there is still no gate someone without an account can pass, and no expiry. Stacktree lives in that middle ground: every URL is unguessable and acts as the credential, so anyone you send the link to can open it with no account at all, ChatGPT or otherwise, and you can layer gates on top.

• Gated viewing without accounts. Optional shared password or email-domain gate: the viewer proves they own an address at your client's domain via a one-time magic link, no account created. Neither exists in the Sites docs.
• Expiry and burn-after-read. Schedule a link to expire or delete after first view, free. No expiry is documented for Sites.
• Any agent, over API. The publish primitive is MCP-native and works from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Claude.ai. Sites is created in ChatGPT conversations, with no documented API, CLI, or MCP surface.
• Your own domain, programmatically. Both products document custom domains now. Stacktree maps them from Solo at $19 a month through Cloudflare for SaaS, re-binds them to any site, and an agent can rent one over x402; Sites connects a domain you already own, where available, and not in Enterprise workspaces at launch.
• No subscription to try it. Anonymous first publish for 24 hours, then a free 3-page trial, then flat $19, $79 and $249 plans, never per-seat. ChatGPT Sites needs a paid ChatGPT subscription to create, and usage is included only "up to plan-specific limits" during the beta, with no documented way to buy more.
• Own and export the infrastructure. Stacktree is source-available and self-hostable on your own Cloudflare (Workers, R2, D1). Export and self-host are not documented for Sites.
• End-to-end encryption when you want it. Optional E2E mode where the key lives in the URL fragment and the server stores only ciphertext, free.

Be clear about Stacktree's limits too. It hosts static HTML only: no serverless backend, no built-in database for the published app, and no in-browser live editor. Workspace-wide SSO is on the roadmap, with the per-link email-domain gate covering most cases today. If your artifact is a data-backed app that needs server logic, Codex Sites does more out of the box.

Who should pick which

Pick ChatGPT Sites if you are a paid ChatGPT subscriber and want a full app with a database and server logic, whether that is an internal workspace tool or a public site on your own domain. Pick Stacktree if the page is a deliverable that should be gated rather than public (a password or email gate the viewer passes with no account), needs an expiry, or gets published and revised by an agent over API/MCP.

The two together

They are not mutually exclusive. Keep building data-backed apps in ChatGPT Sites, and reach for Stacktree the moment you need to send a page to a client without making it public and without asking them to sign in. Have the agent render the static view as HTML, publish it to Stacktree, and share the unguessable link, gated if you want, on your own domain, no ChatGPT account required to view.