Shipslides vs. Speaker Deck: Why HTML Slides Need HTML Hosting
When it comes to sharing slide decks in the developer and tech community, Speaker Deck has long been a popular choice. It is clean, ad-free, and easy to use. However, Speaker Deck has one major limitation: **it only accepts PDF uploads**.
If you build your presentations using modern web-based slides-as-code frameworks—likeReveal.js, Slidev, or Marp—exporting your slides to a PDF to host them on Speaker Deck is a massive downgrade.
In this article, we look at why interactive HTML slide decks require dedicated HTML hosting, and compare how Shipslides and Speaker Deck stack up.
The PDF Problem: What You Lose on Speaker Deck
Exporting HTML presentations to a PDF strips out everything that makes web slides great:
- Interactivity: Embedded widgets, interactive data visualizations (e.g. D3.js or Chart.js), and live code sandboxes are completely deactivated.
- Animations and Transitions: Cinematic 3D transitions (like in impress.js) or slide build animations are flattened into single, static pages.
- Embedded Media: You cannot run embedded YouTube videos or HTML5 audio/video inside a PDF slides player.
- Theme Fidelity: System font differences or complex CSS styling sometimes render incorrectly during PDF conversion, leading to misaligned text.
The Shipslides Alternative: Native HTML Hosting
Shipslides was built to address these exact limitations. By hosting your raw, self-contained HTML files directly, we preserve the exact web experience you designed.
To keep viewers safe from untrusted scripts, Shipslides serves each deck inside a strict iframe sandbox with a custom Content Security Policy (CSP). Viewers get full interactive animations, Vue/React components, and custom CSS without security compromises.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Shipslides | Speaker Deck |
|---|---|---|
| Allowed Formats | HTML (.html), ZIP bundles | PDF (.pdf) only |
| Rich Media & Videos | Yes (Embedded iframes, YouTube) | No (Static placeholders) |
| Interactive Code Playgrounds | Yes (Vue, Canvas, interactive JS) | No |
| Sitemap & Indexing | Auto-generated sitemaps + transcripts | Indexed search catalog |
| Viewer Experience | Polished custom web player | Clean PDF viewer |
Conclusion
Speaker Deck remains a great tool if your presentations are composed strictly of text and static graphics, or if you design them in Keynote/PowerPoint and just want a simple link.
But if you write slides as code using web standards, converting to PDF is a compromise you no longer have to make. Shipslides gives you the benefits of instant publishing and discovery without sacrificing a single line of your interactive JavaScript.
Ready to publish your HTML slides?
Upload your self-contained Reveal.js, Slidev, or custom HTML/CSS deck to Shipslides today.
Upload to Shipslides