Is Vercel overrated? Breaking down 3 great alternatives for hosting modern web apps

By Aatu Väisänen

May 15th, 2025

• Vercel has gained massive popularity in the cloud platform as a service (PaaS) market in the recent years, due to its ease-of-use and fluent integration with their popular Next.js framework.

• Despite its popularity, Vercel has several limitations that might be a deal-breaker to many developers.

• There are several great alternatives to Vercel, such as Render, AWS Amplify, and Cloudflare Pages.

What limitations does Vercel have?

While Vercel is a great platform for quickly and effortlessly deploying modern web applications built with frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, and Remix, it is far from the perfect all-in-one solution. Some of the most prominent downfalls include:

1. Vendor lock-in (to some degree). While Vercel does support several popular frontend frameworks, it has been mainly built around Next.js, which is developed and maintained by Vercel: the framework infrastructure support matrix in Vercel’s documentation shows that all available Vercel features are only supported by Next.js. The next best options are SvelteKit (which is in fact also mostly sponsored and maintained by Vercel employees these days), Nuxt, and Astro. Until all available features are supported by other than Next.js, it is not far-fetched to say that you are at least highly encouraged to use Next.js as your framework of choice.

   Also, creating a full-stack React app that leverages React Server Components, Next.js is specifically recommended as a framework by the React team. This also supports the claim that in fact Vercel together with Next.js is becoming a vendor lock-in situation: shifting away from Vercel will become increasingly discouraging if you have adopted Next.js as your go-to frontend framework.

2. Pricing at scale. Compared to many alternatives, Vercel’s pricing plan is quite rigid due to their focus on developer convenience and ease-of-use: you’re not paying only for processing time, but a polished product experience with very little overhead required. Compared to many alternative platforms, which grant you more control over the infrastructure, Vercel will most likely be much more costly in the long run due to their fixed base price approach.

3. Limited backend support. While Vercel does have Serverless Functions (or their new version, Fluid Compute) which can handle basic backend tasks, it lacks many features that can be crucial if your application requires a more complex backend setup. For example, there is no support for persistent background workers, Docker usage, or a built-in database solution. Also, with Serverless/Fluid Compute, you are limited to the supported runtime languages (Node.js, Python, Ruby and Go). On top of this, there are limitations in the processing time, memory and payload size which can be a deal-breaker for some applications.

What are the best alternatives for Vercel?

There are many variables to consider, when choosing an alternative platform to Vercel for hosting your application, such as:

• Tech stack compatibility. For example, does the platform support your tech stack and does it integrate with your CI/CD processes?

• Performance. Are there any caveats to scaling your application up if the traffic increases dramatically?

• Pricing. Are you paying based on usage, or is there some fixed level that you need to at least pay?

• Flexibility. How much do you need to customize the server configuration for your application?

• Ecosystem and integrations. Does the platform have a large ecosystem that supports different integrations such as databases and authentication providers?

Render

Render is a great alternative to Vercel, especially if your application needs more complex backend logic. It supports many native runtimes for deployment (Node.js, Bun, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust and Elixir). But wait, here comes the cool part: if your application relies on some other runtime, you can still deploy the application on Render because of its native Docker support. Additionally, Render bundles together managed Postgres databases and key-value datastores (which run on Valkey, an open-source alternative to Redis). All-in-all, while Vercel is focused on running frontend-focused Next.js applications, Render allows deploying full-stack applications without being limited to any single framework and without the need to set up complex third-party integrations.

AWS Amplify

If your applications require more flexibility than Vercel can offer, AWS Amplify is a solid choice. With AWS Amplify, your applications have direct access to the broader AWS ecosystem, which makes AWS Amplify best suited for scalable full-stack applications that can leverage the availability of various additional services like authentication and storage.

Cloudflare Pages

If you just need a place to deploy your static websites, Cloudflare Pages is something to consider instead of Vercel. Cloudflare Pages leverages Cloudflare’s powerful edge network, which enables a blazing fast website experience to the end user. If your application is simply a static website which doesn’t need SSR and doesn’t require much other server-side logic, Cloudflare Pages might just be the right platform for you. If your app could use some serverless functionalities, such as form processing, you can additionally use Cloudflare Workers. They have very low startup and response times thanks to the sophisticated edge network. This makes Cloudflare Workers ideal for applications that require fast responses from their server-side functions. However, it’s good to note that the serverless experience with Cloudflare Workers is not as tightly knit to the experience as a whole, like Vercel’s serverless is with Next.js.

Summary

Vercel has gained huge popularity in recent years due to its fluent developer experience and tight integration with the widely adopted Next.js framework. Despite its popularity, Vercel presents several limitations such as its somewhat rigid pricing model, limited backend capabilities and the strong reliance on Next.js. These can be a strong enough reason to start looking for alternative cloud platforms.

For those seeking alternatives to Vercel, platforms like Render, AWS Amplify, and Cloudflare Pages offer different advantages. Render supports a wide range backend capabilities, making it more suitable for full-stack applications. AWS Amplify provides access to the broader AWS ecosystem, making it ideal for applications that can greatly benefit from a more scalable and flexible architecture. Cloudflare Pages excels at serving static websites with minimal server-side requirements: it can be paired with Cloudflare Workers for fast, edge-powered serverless functions.