Vercel vs Netlify: Where to host a NextJs project in 2023?

If you've come here with the question "why should I host my NextJs project with Vercel/Netlify", then you've come to the right place. In this arcticle we're going to go over:

• Why and when you would want to choose one provider over another?

• What do they offer?

• What are the limitations of each provider?

  

What even are these platforms?

Vercel and Netlify are the two most popular Jamstack hosting platforms. Jamstack platforms offer what we like to call "serveless platforms" which essentially mean that once your code build (usually triggered by uploading your project to git) has completed, they can serve it over their blazingly fast Edge Network. Since the pages are prebuilt then this usually means that your site is going to be faster, easier to scale and efficient in providing search engines with metadata (better SEO)

This process makes it incredibly easy to setup a static site. Take this blog for example, It's based on a NextJs Tailwind blog template, which I got up and running on Netlify in under 15 minutes, pretty awesome huh.

Vercel

Vercel is a cloud platform that empowers developers to quickly and efficiently deploy web projects.

They are the creator of the NextJs framework and therefore are specialized in deploying NextJs applications. This doesn't mean that you can only deploy Next applications. In this article let's focus on Next though.

We can see that over 470k sites are built with Vercel, with 2% of them being in the 10k most popular pages in the world.

Some notable examples are: Patreon, Gap, McDonalds

Netlify

Another great static website hosting company. 🚀

Netlify is a cloud-based development platform for web developers and businesses wanting to host their websites. It uses open web standards and Git integration to build, deploy, and scale websites served via a CDN.

Today we can see that over 500k sites are built with Netlify, with 3% of them being in the 10k most popular pages in the world.

Some notable examples are: Yelp, FireFox, Python

Main differences

Price

Both Vercel and Netlify have a generous free tiers, you can see the up to date pricing info displayed here (Vercel) or here (Netlify)

Build

Vercel takes the lead in this comparison by offering a generous limit of 100 build hours per month for free, which can be extended to 400 build hours with their Pro plan costing $20 per month per member.

In contrast, Netlify provides only 5 build hours minutes for free, and beyond that, it charges $7 for every additional 500 minutes.

To give some context to how much the free build minutes actually mean, a single build of this blog takes about a minute on Netlify. In theory I can make ~300 changes in a month before I reach the free limit.

Commercialization

Can I host ads on my free Vercel NextJs page?

No.

Can I create a free affiliate marketing NextJs page on Vercel?

No.

Can I create a free e-commerce store on Vercel?

No, no, and no.

Vercel has stated in it's fair use policy that commercialization is prohibited with their free tier. If you want to make money with your site, you have to upgrade to their paid tier.

Netlify is the clear winner here: they allow commercialization on their free tier, plain and simple. So slap those ads on your blog post and you're off to the races. 🐎

Serverless Functions

Both providers offer serverless functions with slight differences.

Netlify bills based on how many times you use the functions, they give you 125k invocations for free. After that, you are charged 25$ "when exceeded" (how many extra invocations? Who knows)

Vercel on the other hand gives you 100GB hours free, and 1000GB hours with the Pro plan. So rather than being billed on the number of invocations, the functions are billed on compute time (if the free tier is exceeded).

Edge

Both Netlify and Vercel give you 100GB of bandwidth free.

Forms

Vercel doesn't offer forms, you would have to use a 3rd party provider.

Netlify offers 100 form submissions for free in a month and then "$19+ when exceeded".

Identity

Again Vercel doesn't offer a way to authenticate users without a 3rd party provider.

Netlify offers 1k free authenticated users per month.

Analytics

Here we see that Netlify is the one that doesn't offer anything in their free tier. You would need to cough up 9$ per month to see analytics with Netlify.

Vercel on the other hand gives you free analytics about the last 2.5k events that happened within 30 days. (An event on a Vercel page means a page view or a custom event set up by you.)

You could also hook up Google Analytics for free on both platforms.

Conclusion

These are the free tier features of both providers

If I wanted to monetize my site from the free tier, then I would have no choice but to go with Netlify.

Otherwise, the extra build time that Vercel offers might come in handy, although unlikely that you will even hit Netlify's build time if releases are done reasonably.

Winner for me: Netlify.