Can you publish a private document on RPubs?

No. RPubs is a free public publishing service — every document you push from the Publish button is world-readable and indexable. Deleting a document is the only access control it has. If a report contains client data, headcount, revenue or anything under an NDA, RPubs is the wrong destination and there is no setting that changes that.

What is the closest thing to RPubs but private?

Comma: knit to a self-contained HTML file as usual, then publish it with one API call or by dragging it in. You get a stable URL with private, team, domain-gated or link visibility, anchored comments on the rendered output, and a revision history at the same URL. Posit Connect is the heavyweight option if you also need scheduled R execution behind your own firewall.

Do I have to change my R Markdown workflow?

No. Keep `rmarkdown::render()` and `output: html_document` with `self_contained: true`. The only change is where the resulting .html goes after it exists — a POST instead of the RStudio Publish button.

Can people comment on a published R Markdown report?

Not on RPubs. On Comma, readers select a paragraph, a plot or a table cell and leave a thread anchored to that element, which survives re-publishing a new knit of the same report.

RPubs alternatives for private R Markdown reports

RPubs is a genuinely good on-ramp. You knit, you click Publish, and thirty seconds later there is a URL you can paste into an email. For a teaching example, a conference talk, a reproducible blog post, it is still hard to beat.

The wall is always the same sentence: "can you send me that, but where Legal won't see it on Google?"

What RPubs does not do

Nothing is private. Every RPubs document is public and crawlable. There is no unlisted mode, no password, no team. The only lever is delete.
No versions. Re-publishing replaces the document. There is no history, no diff, and no way to answer "what did this say last Tuesday?"
No comments. Feedback happens in email or Slack, detached from the chart it is about — so it arrives as "the second plot looks off" and you spend the next message working out which one that was.
No automation path. The Publish button is an RStudio IDE action. A nightly Rscript job on a build server has no equivalent, which is why most scheduled R reports end up as email attachments instead.

The shortlist

1. Comma — same knit, private URL, comments on the output

Keep the R Markdown exactly as it is. Knit to a self-contained HTML file and publish that file:

rmarkdown::render("weekly-cohorts.Rmd")

httr::POST(
  "https://commareports.com/api/v1/reports",
  httr::add_headers(Authorization = paste("Bearer", Sys.getenv("COMMA_API_TOKEN"))),
  body = list(
    title = "Weekly cohorts",
    html = paste(readLines("weekly-cohorts.html"), collapse = "\n"),
    visibility = "team"
  ),
  encode = "json"
)

What that buys over the Publish button: visibility levels (private, team, email-domain, link), anchored comment threads on the rendered report, and revisions at a stable id — PATCH the same report next week and the URL you already sent keeps working while the history stays diffable.

Plotly, leaflet, DT and htmlwidgets keep working; the report renders in a sandboxed iframe with scripts allowed, which is what interactive R output needs. See sharing an R Markdown report.

Not for: running R. Comma stores and serves the rendered artifact; the knit still happens wherever it happens today.

Pricing: Free — unlimited reports, unlimited viewers and commenters, unlimited revisions. Team and Enterprise are sales-led.

Try the quickstart →

2. Posit Connect — when R itself has to run on a server

The official grown-up answer, and the right one if you need scheduled execution of R and Python on infrastructure you control, with LDAP/SAML users and parameterized reports. It is a licensed server product with an operating cost to match. See Posit Connect alternatives for the honest version of that tradeoff.

3. Quarto Pub — the modern successor, same public problem

If you have moved from R Markdown to Quarto, Quarto Pub is the equivalent one-command publish — and, like RPubs, the free service publishes to the open web. See Quarto Pub alternatives.

4. GitHub Pages — free, versioned, still public

Commit the knitted HTML to a gh-pages branch and it is hosted, with git as your version history. Private Pages needs an Enterprise plan, and there is no comment layer on the rendered page. See GitHub Pages alternatives.

At a glance

Tool	Private option	Versions	Comments on the report	Publish from a script
Comma	Yes — 5 levels	Yes	Yes, anchored	Yes (REST / MCP)
RPubs	No	No	No	No
Posit Connect	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Quarto Pub	Paid tiers	No	No	Yes (CLI)
GitHub Pages	Enterprise only	Via git	No	Via Actions

Checked September 2026. Verify current plans before committing.

How to choose

Public, one-off, teaching or portfolio? Stay on RPubs. It is free and it works.
A recurring internal report that someone reacts to? You need identity-based access and a place for the reaction to land next to the number — that is the job Comma does.
R has to execute on a schedule inside your network? Posit Connect.