Netlify and Vercel are serverless deployment platforms for web applications, both designed to allow you to deploy as quickly and easily as possible. Both have very similar feature sets, so which one should you use? In this article, I'll be answering that question.
Build + Edge = đź’•
The core feature set of both Netlify and Vercel is the build + Edge stack. Essentially, you trigger a build step either by using Git or uploading manually. Once built, your app is automatically deployed to Netlify or Vercel's Edge Network to ensure a fast UX. This makes it incredibly easy to steup a static site (e.g. a blog like this one), since all you have to do is push your code. They're fairly equal in this matter, so I wouldn't consider either to be better.
Serverless Functions
Static sites are all well and good, but most applications need a backend to function. For this purpose, both Netlify and Vercel offer serverless functions via AWS Lambda.
Netlify
For Netlify, you create a functions directory in your project folder. You can then add AWS Lambda handlers in JavaScript or Go. Routing is handled based on the directory structure. You can read more at the official documentation here.
Vercel
Vercel has a very similar interface, using an api directory in your project, but it pulls out ahead in the features department with its support for Python and Ruby as well as JavaScript and Go, and it also supports a custom Express.js-like (req, res) => {...} format for JavaScript functions, as well as optional Edge caching for responses.
Server Side Rendering
Server-Side rendering, or SSR, is a huge win for Vercel, as it's just not really feasible with Netlify. On Vercel, you can deploy a server-side rendered Next.js application within minutes.
Authentication
Netlify has a built-in authentication platform based on the GoTrue API which you can easily setup. With Vercel, you'll have to setup authentication some other way.
Backend for Static Sites
Netlify provides three features which make it trivially easy to add common functionality to your site:
- Netlify Forms: Manage forms and submissions without setting up any backend
- Netlify Analytics (Paid): Server-side analytics you can setup with no client-side code whatsoever
- Split Testing: Netlify allows you to easily A/B test two deployments
Pricing
Both Netlify and Vercel have generous free plans. You can see the full pricing info here, here, and here, but here's a quick comparison:
Build
Vercel is ahead here, with a soft limit of 100 build hours / month for free and 400 with the Pro plan ($20/month per member) compared to Netlify's 300 build minutes / month free and then $7/500 minutes. Most projects won't need anywhere near this much time anyway, so it probably won't matter for you.
Edge
Both Netlify and Vercel give you 100GB of bandwidth free (although that's a soft limit for Vercel). Netlify sells additional bandwidth at $20/100 and Vercel gives you 1 TB with the Pro plan (also a soft limit).
Serverless Functions
Netlify bills based on the number of invocations, whereas Vercel bills based on GB-hours since you can customize your serveless function instances. Netlify gives you 125k invocations free, and then charges "$25+ when exceeded" (your guess is as good as mine). Vercel gives you 100GB-hours free, and 1000GB-hours with the Pro plan.
Netlify Forms, Identity, and Analytics
Forms get 100 free submissions, then cost "$19+ when exceeded." Identity gives you 1000 free monthly active users, then charges $99 when exceeded. Analytics costs a flat rate of $9/month.
Conclusion
We can see a clear divergence of interests between Netlify and Vercel, two extremely similar products at first glance. Netlify is focused on making it easy to create client-side, static applications, and delivers on that goal wonderfully. Vercel, on the other hand, focuses on making back-end work simple. If you're creating a static site, Netlify is the clear choice, but if you need more server-side functionality and you don't mind spending a little time, Vercel is the way to go.
Top comments (28)
It may be important to note the differences when it comes to eCommerce:
Vercel: It’s against Vercel’s TOS to run a commercial app on the free tier. Even though you technically could, they will shut down your site if caught in violation. So you need to go with the $20/mo Pro plan to do commerce on Vercel.
Netlify: Even though the free tier is labeled as “for hobby and experiments”, they allow commercial use of it, such as for eCommerce sites. The only restriction they impose in the TOS is that the content must not break US law.
So it’s free to do commerce on Netlify.
Hi,
I was going to host a personal portfolio, a website with free games I create, and a website with free apps & code libraries that I make. All of this is free so would this count as commercial? I would love to keep hosting on vercel (none of this is deployed yet, other experiments are) but if this counts as commercial (it shouldn't because I'm not getting any money), I will switch to netlify.
Thanks!
That's not commercial use so you should be fine
Ok thanks!
This is what I came here for, thanks!
this is the reason why i am planning on switching to vercel
Thanks a lot!
Wow, Netlify does support this? Nice.
I think there might be a typo in this section where "Vercel" is mentioned twice:
Build
Vercel is ahead here, with a soft limit of 100 build hours / month for free and 400 with the Pro plan ($20/month per member) compared to Vercel's 300 build minutes / month free and then $7/500 minutes.
And I think the correction is still wrong. Here Netlify is the clear winner
Why, exactly? 100 hours seems pretty clearly better than 5 hours. The paid plan works out to $0.07/hr of extra time (even if the only thing you use it for is that) compared to Netlify's $0.84/hr.
Obviously it's somewhat unclear what happens after hitting 400hrs but almost nobody needs that much and I would be pretty surprised if Vercel charged more than $0.84/hr on the Enterprise plan.
OK, I was a victim of the units. I thought both were being measured in minutes, so I thought it was 100 vs 300
I am doing SSR on Netlify. I'm doing an NX mono repo with react and remix. Did it on Vercel too. Netlify was a much more pleasant experience.
you forgot to mention Netlify CMS
You can use Netlify CMS without Netlify
Still, best to use it with Netlify for client work and swap over to git-gateway ,so they don't need a GitHub account
Helpful comparison, thank you.
What of pages.cloudflare.com/
If I were to update this, I would definitely include CF Pages. The only thing it lacks is easy serverless function integration, but it's definitely the way to go for static sites and sites with massive bandwidth requirements.
Saving bandwidth is easy with Cloudflare as CDN.
Setup a domain and then
For netlifly, => apex-loadbalancer.netlify.com and a WWW CNAME for the domain
For vercel => cname.vercel-dns.com and A RECORD 76.76.21.21 and a
And enjoy the best of all 3 worlds
Yeah sure. Concerning Serverless, I think it uses cloudflare workers
Thanks. Here's a side by side comparison of features and pricing of Vercel VS Netlify
Super insightful. Exactly what I needed. Thank you!
Vercel have 3000 request limit to there databases, but in my case I am not using any database so, is there any limit on request to my simple API or just a static website
Vercel is ahead on build? The data don't support that, do they?
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