Deploying Shiny apps to the web
Once you’ve written your Shiny app, you can make it available to anyone who has a web browser, using our Shiny Server software. You can either host the applications on your own server, or let us host your Shiny applications for you.
If you want a simple way to distribute your Shiny app so that users can run them on their own computers, see Sharing apps to run locally.
However if you want your users to access your apps easily via their browser, you will need to deploy your apps to the web. The following four
Posit Connect Cloud
Want to deploy to the web but prefer not to run your own server? You can host your Shiny apps on the web in minutes with Posit Connect Cloud. It is easy to use, secure, and scalable. No hardware, installation, or annual purchase contract required. If you choose to use Posit Connect Cloud for deploying your apps to the web, you do not need to run your own server and you can easily deploy to the web at the push of a button (or one line of R code). However it is important to keep in mind that your code and data must be copied to our servers since this service is hosted by Posit. Free and paid options available. Find out more about Posit Connect Cloud here.
Shiny Server
With our open-source Shiny Server software, you can deploy Shiny applications to the web so that users need only a web browser and your application’s URL. Shiny Server allows you to take advantage of centralized computing resources, and requires a Linux server that you will need to set up and maintain. To can find out more about Shiny Server, see Introduction to Shiny Server.
Posit Connect
Posit Connect is Posit’s publishing platform for the work your teams create in R. With Posit Connect, you can share Shiny applications, R Markdown reports, dashboards, plots, Jupyter Notebooks, and more in one convenient place with push-button publishing from the RStudio IDE. Features include scheduled execution of reports and flexible security policies to bring the power of data science to your entire enterprise. Find out more about Posit Connect here.
shinyapps.io
shinyapps.io is a cloud-based hosting service for Shiny applications.
This is a legacy Posit hosting service that has been replaced by Posit Connect Cloud. If you are already using shinyapps.io, you can continue to do so, but we recommend that new users use Posit Connect Cloud instead. At the end of 2026, all shinyapps.io users will be migrated to Posit Connect Cloud. Find out more about shinyapps.io here.