Genially's HTML download keeps the interactivity a PDF export throws away — but it lands as a ZIP with an entry file that isn't index.html, and it needs a paid plan. Here's the honest shape of that export.
Genially is good at the thing most presentation tools are bad at: making something that responds. Hotspots that open. Layers that reveal. Navigation that isn't just "next slide." It's why people reach for it for training modules, interactive reports, and classroom material.
Which makes the export question sharper than usual. Most export formats destroy exactly the property you chose the tool for.
Genially offers several download formats, and they're not interchangeable — they're a spectrum of how much of your work survives.
PDF and image exports flatten the creation. Every hotspot becomes a picture of a hotspot. Every animation becomes the frame it happened to be on. If your piece was mostly layout, that's survivable. If it was interactive — and if it wasn't, why did you build it here — you've exported a photograph of a thing that used to work.
The HTML (offline) export is the one that doesn't. It's a real web page, so the interactivity runs client-side exactly as it does on their platform: buttons, hotspots, navigation, animations, all of it.
That's the download to reach for whenever the interaction is the content.
It's behind their paywall. Downloading a creation is a premium feature on Genially, and HTML-for-offline is one of the paid download options. This is worth checking before you promise a client a self-hosted version, because it's their gate — no host can route around it. On the free tier the export doesn't exist and their public share link is what you have.
The entry file isn't called index.html. The ZIP contains genially.html plus the assets folder it depends on. This sounds trivial and isn't, because a lot of static hosts hard-require index.html at the root and will 404 on anything else. Your options are to rename it and hope nothing internal referenced the old name, or to use a host that picks the entry page sensibly — preferring index.html when it's there, otherwise taking the shallowest HTML file in the bundle. The second is less fragile: you're not editing an export you didn't author.
And Genially's own guidance on the download is worth respecting literally: don't move the extracted files out of their folder. The relative paths are load-bearing. Which is the argument for uploading the ZIP as it arrived rather than unpacking, poking around, and re-zipping something subtly different.
Genially documents that external content — an embedded YouTube video, say — won't play in the offline export without a connection. This gets read as a flaw in the export. It isn't; it's arithmetic. A video hosted on someone else's servers cannot be inside your ZIP.
But notice who that caveat is written for: someone opening the file from a hard drive on a plane. The moment you host the export at a URL instead, the premise inverts. Your reader is online — they had to be, to open a link. The embed streams. The caveat mostly stops applying.
This is a quietly good reason to host the export rather than pass the ZIP around. You get the interactivity of the offline build and the connectivity of the platform version.
Genially's own share link is fewer steps and works fine. For public content it's the obvious choice, and there's no reason to be precious about it.
Hosting the export earns its extra step when you need something the public link doesn't do:
The rule of thumb: public resource → their link. Client work, paid modules, internal material → host the export.
genially.html on its own.Drop the export ZIP in as-is — the entry page gets found even though it isn't named index.html — and get one private link with your interactions intact.
The broader pattern is one that shows up across every interactive-authoring tool: the export that preserves interactivity is a folder, not a file, and folders don't travel well by email. They travel fine as links.
Which is the same reason a hosted link beats a zipped attachment in most hand-offs, and why interactive activities travel better as a link than as an export you email around at all.
The attachment arrived, nothing was blocked, and your recipient sees markup instead of the page. That's three different email failures people keep merging into one. Here's which one you hit, and why the fix isn't a different attachment.
Upload an .html file to Drive, open it, and you get a wall of markup instead of the page. Nothing is broken — Drive is doing exactly what a filing cabinet does. Here's the mechanism, the workarounds people try, and what actually renders it.
Email providers cap attachments around 20-25MB. The fix when the file is bigger isn't to compress harder — it's to send the URL instead.
miinideck turns a single HTML file into an unguessable link with optional password and expiry. Default-private, never indexed.