This is a comparison written by people who make one of the options, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to be straight about where the free tools win, because in a fair number of cases they do, and pretending otherwise would just waste your evening.
The short version: the right choice depends almost entirely on how many things you run and how many of them have dates attached. If the answer is "two classes, no dates," stop reading after the next section. You are done.
When a Linktree is genuinely enough
If you teach a fixed weekly class or two at one studio, everything books through that studio, and you do not run workshops, privates, series or retreats, then a Linktree is enough. It is free, it takes ninety seconds, and it will not be wrong in six months because there is nothing on it that can go out of date.
Three links, none of them dated: the studio timetable, your Instagram, your email. That is a correct answer to "where can I find you," and anyone telling you it is not is selling you something.
The same is true if you already have a Linktree that works and you are only considering a change because you saw someone else's nicer page. Switching costs you an evening and gains you nothing if nothing on yours is wrong. Fix things that are wrong.
And one more concession, because it is the one people skip: no page of any kind fixes not being findable. If nobody can turn your first name into your name, a better page does not help, because they never get to it.
The option nobody lists: an Instagram bio and nothing else
Worth taking seriously, because a lot of teachers are here and it is not always wrong.
If your Instagram name field has your real name, your bio line has your city and your class times, and your highlights hold the things you run, then you have a page. It is a bad page in some respects, and it is free, already updated, and already where the people looking for you are standing.
Where it fails is not the design. It fails when someone who does not use Instagram tries to find you, when a studio manager wants to check your schedule without an account, and when your class times change and the bio still says Tuesdays because bios are annoying to edit on a phone.
But if you are choosing between an Instagram bio you keep current and a Linktree you will not, keep the Instagram bio. A correct thing beats a better-shaped wrong thing every time, and that principle survives the rest of this article.
Linktree
Good at: existing immediately. Free tier is real, not crippled. Everyone recognizes the format, so nobody is confused about what to do when they land on it. It also loads fast on a bad phone connection outside a studio, which is more than most teacher websites manage.
Bad at: saying anything. A Linktree is a row of doors with no rooms behind them. Someone who wants to know when you teach, what a private costs, or whether the retreat still has space has to click out to two or three different places to find out. Most people click out once and do not come back.
The real weakness: nothing on it ever tells you it has gone stale. There is no date, no expiry, no nudge. So it slowly becomes a record of things that already happened. Open yours right now. There is a fair chance the top link is a workshop from last spring.
Right for you if: you have three links and none of them have dates on them.
bio.site, Beacons, Stan Store
Good at: the same job with a better-looking page, an email capture field, and in Stan's case a real checkout. If you sell recordings, a course, or anything downloadable, Stan in particular does something the others do not, and it does it well.
Bad at: the thing most teachers actually need. These are built for people who sell digital products at a distance. Your work happens in a room in your city on Tuesday at seven. Most of what you would be paying for does not apply to that, and the parts that do apply are the same parts Linktree gives you free.
Right for you if: you sell something downloadable and the transaction is the point of the page.
Not a reason to choose one: that it looks nicer. It does. Nobody has ever booked a class because the buttons had rounded corners.
A website you build yourself
Squarespace, Wix, Carrd, a Notion page with a domain in front of it. Carrd deserves a specific mention: it is cheap, it is one page, and a single scrolling page with your schedule on it is genuinely a good shape for this. If you are going to build something yourself, that is the shape to build.
Good at: everything, in principle. It is yours, it can hold as much as you like, it can say things in your own order, and it can rank in search for your name plus your city, which link-in-bio pages generally do not.
Bad at: existing past month four. A site costs money or a weekend or both, and then it needs maintaining forever, by you, in a tool you open four times a year and have to relearn every time.
This is the honest failure mode and it is not hypothetical. We have looked at a lot of genuinely lovely teacher websites where the schedule is from last spring and the retreat has already happened. A neglected website is worse than a Linktree, because it looks authoritative while being wrong. A Linktree that is out of date looks careless. A website that is out of date looks like you stopped teaching.
Right for you if: you enjoy this kind of thing, or you have a friend who does it and actually keeps doing it. Both are fine reasons. Neither is a moral requirement.
The four questions that actually decide it
Forget the categories. Ask these of anything you are considering, including what you already have.
Can someone find out when and where you teach, without leaving the page? Most link-in-bio pages fail this on the first question anyone asks.
Does it say what else you do? Privates, workshops, the beginner series, the retreat. If a page only shows the class someone already knows about, it has told them nothing new.
Can you reach the people who care about your work without a feed deciding whether to show them? This is the difference between a way to be found and a way to be in touch. Both are useful. They are not the same thing.
What does it look like in four months if you never touch it? This is the question almost nobody asks and the one that decides everything, because you will not touch it. Not out of laziness. Because you teach six classes a week and nobody has ever spent a rest day updating a website they meant to update.
Score whatever you are using out of four. If it gets three, leave it alone. Genuinely. The gap between three and four is not worth an evening you could spend not working.
Where we come into it
We build Namaspot, which is a page of the fourth kind, so it is only fair to say so plainly rather than pretend this article arrived from nowhere. It was built around the fourth question specifically: things with dates on them expire by themselves, things without dates stay up forever, and a retreat that finished in June stops being announced and becomes something you have run rather than something you are selling.
That is the whole design idea, and it is worth exactly as much as the fourth question is worth to you. If your answer to the fourth question is "nothing on my page can go out of date," you do not need us and the free tool is the correct choice.
What to actually do this week
Open whatever you have now and check one thing: is anything on it untrue.
If nothing is untrue, close it and go and teach. You do not have a page problem.
If something is untrue, fix that one thing today, in the tool you already have. Then, separately, and only if it keeps happening, ask whether the tool is the reason it keeps happening. That is a real question and sometimes the answer is yes. But fix the wrong line first, because it takes two minutes and it is the only part a visitor ever sees.