Digital portfolio: better a personal website or GitHub?

It depends on what you want to show: if you work with code, GitHub is perfect because recruiters already check it, but if you want a more professional and polished image, a personal website looks better. The best solution is to do both, with the site linking to your most important repos - that way you get GitHub's technical credibility with the polished presentation of a real portfolio. GitHub costs nothing and is already a portfolio of sorts if you keep your repos public and decent, but a website gives you total freedom in design and how you tell the story of your skills.

The right choice is to have both, not one or the other. GitHub serves one specific purpose: showing your code, your projects, how you work, your track record. A personal website serves everything else: the narrative, how you present yourself, the things that don't show in code.

For years I thought GitHub was enough, then I realized that when you're looking for work or clients, people don't just want to dig through your repos randomly. They want to understand who you are, what you do, which projects actually interest you. A website let me tell the "why" behind things, highlight my best work, create a narrative. GitHub remains the place where people verify you actually know how to code.

If you absolutely have to choose (zero budget, zero time), then yeah, GitHub is the bare minimum if you're doing development. But as soon as you can, create a simple landing page too that links to GitHub, maybe with a photo of you, a couple lines about yourself, your main projects highlighted. It doesn't have to be complicated: these days even static site generators are fast. The combination is what actually works best.

It's not really about choosing one or the other - it's more that the two serve different audiences and require completely different maintenance schedules. You check GitHub when you need to understand how someone works, and you check the website when maybe a client or someone who doesn't know anything about programming needs to get an idea. The real problem nobody mentions is that a lot of guys create an awesome website and then abandon it for months - someone shows up, sees the date of the last update, and thinks you're inactive. GitHub, on the other hand, is "alive" by nature: your commits are visible, your projects have history, everything speaks for you.

If you do what's suggested in the other comments and maintain both, great, but if you can only keep one in order at first, start with GitHub. It's less work to maintain, it's already where people go who know what they're looking for, and you show your work in a context where it's normal for things to be in progress. A website can come later, when you have time to keep it decent. An abandoned website is worse than not having one at all.