Vercel vs Netlify - Which One Should You Use?
In this post I want to compare Vercel vs Netlify so you know which one suits you better for your next project.
What is it?
The first question is "What are these services at all?". They are two most popular serverless platforms.
Serverless is a cloud-native development model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers
They both are using JAM stack. It means Javascript, Markup and API.
The main idea is that most of the projects that people are deploying are frontend only projects which just deploys a prebuild HTML, Javascript and CSS.
But it is still possible in both platforms to implement your backend and work with the database in both platforms.
And you can either use CLI tools to deploy your projects or bind your Git repository to services to deploy your changes automatically.
Popularity
Now let's talk about popularity. Vercel is extremely popular because of NextJS. This is the company who created NextJS.
NextJS is the most popular framework for React for server side rendering.
Which actually means that they wrote NextJS and they promoted Vercel in every single article for deployment and obviously people used Vercel as an easy solution to deploy their projects to production. So Vercel can easily deploy NextJS projects with server side rendering. And long time it was a killer feature of Vercel but nowadays Netlify can do exactly the same.
So which one is more popular at the end?
Both companies are extremely popular and the amount of websites which are build with both of them is huge. Also lots of big companies are using these platforms so it is completely safe to use them and they won't disappear overnight.
Pricing
Now let's talk about pricing. Both free tiers on Vercel and Netlify are extremely generous. You are getting lots of stuff completely for free and the similar expenses on AWS for such tier would be $36.
But as always to understand which service to choose to must look through every single feature that you are getting. This is the only way to be sure that you are getting a best deal.
For example in both project in Free tier you are getting 100GB bandwidth per month. But afterwards you must pay another $55 for every 100GB which is quite a lot.
The building time of your project on Netlify is 300 minutes which on average means 300 deployments per month.
The typicall React project builds around 1 minute so you can redeploy your project 300 times.
In comparison on Vercel you are getting 6000 minutes. This is a lot of time for building so if you plan to rebuild your project lots of times it might be that Vercel is better for you.
The most important difference
Here is the most important difference. On the Vercel it is forbidden on the free tier to do any commercial usage. Which actually means you can't use Google Adsense on your blog, you can't sell something on the website and you can't build an ecommerce shop there. It is all forbidden on Vercel and you can do that only on paid tier.
But it is all free on Netlify. You can do all this stuff on the free tier. This is why it makes a lot of sense to take free tier if you plan to run a business and sell something. You can start with it for free at the beginning and you can scale it later.
Serverless functions
Now we must talk about serverless functions.
Serverless functions enable developers to write functions in Javascript and other languages to handle authentication, form submissions, database queries and more.
It's code that will be executed inside Vercel or Netlify. On Netlify we are getting 125k script invocations. On Vercel it's functions execution time and not the amount of call and it's 100GB-hours. Still this is quite a lot for a small or medium project.
Creating forms
Another important feature of Netlify which we don't have inside Vercel is forms. Inside Netlify we can build form without any additional payments. Which actually means that you can implement some forms and send them to your users to get some feedback and it can be integrated with different services. We don't have something like that inside Vercel but you can use different third-party providers to implement forms.
Authentication
The same I can say about authentication. On Netlify we are getting it out of the box and 1000 users are for free there but we don't have such functionality on Vercel. But again to can achieve that with third-party providers.
Analytics
Another important point is that inside Vercel we are getting analytics out of the box even on the free tier. We get access to 2500 events. Netlify also has analytics but it is not free. We must pay for it additionally and it is not cheap. It costs additional $9 per month.
And here you can see the diagram with most important differences between Netlify and Vercel. So now the main question is what would I choose for myself?
My winner is for sure Netlify. Even if we have small built time it doesn't really matter because we can implement payment solutions on the free tier. We can't do that inside Vercel at all this is why it doesn't really make sense for me. But still Vercel is completely fine for the projects that you don't want to monetize from the start.
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