Vercel vs Netlify: Battle of the Composable Web platforms

By Ikius Team

April 3rd, 2024

• Both Vercel and Netlify are excellent choices for the Composable Web

• Vercel is ideal for developers prioritizing performance and Next.js

• Netlify could suits teams looking for an all-in-one, straightforward workflow.

Intro

Concepts such as Composable Web and Jamstack continue to be popular in 2024, or at least the principle of combining Javascript, API, and Markup for modern web development. Nowadays, it has been shown that the concept is oftentimes just known as Composable Web, or Modern web development instead of Jamstack, but the idea is still relevant. However, let's continue talking in terms of Composable Web in this post.

This article is written to help you choose between Vercel and Netlify if you plan on building a Composable website or migrating your WordPress site to a stack such as Next.js + a Headless CMS. But even if you’re just curious about the two deployment platforms, follow on, there’s probably something for you to learn here. 

• In this post:

Benefits of Vercel and Netlify

Composable Web's performance heavily depends on the deployment platform you choose. The reason is that Composable Websites are tailored for a certain workflow: hosting HTML on a CDN, serverless functions on an Edge network, and code in Git. Such a deployment strategy makes your site faster, more secure and scalable among other notable benefits (which we'll get to later in this post). 

On the contrary, a Composable Website will be just another pile of HTML, only reachable by search engines with the right provider. 

Vercel and Netlify are the two most popular Composable Web platforms, highly regarded in the industry for their reliability and performance. Here, we’ll cover how they compare.

A quick intro to Composable Web

Composable Web is an approach to web development that guarantees high speed, scalability and better security etc. Previously, this approach was often called Jamstack, but nowadays Composable Web is probably a better term to use. It’s based on a decoupled architecture, meaning that the front-end is completely independent of the content management system (CMS) and other bits and pieces that together form a functioning website.

The core principle of Composable Web (or Jamstack) is that all the content is pre-rendered at build time, so you don’t have any expensive runtime calculations on the server for processing user requests. And, contrary to dynamic server-side rendering, you can deploy your static site on a content delivery network (CDN) for even faster loads. 

You probably heard the buzzword “Serverless Platforms,” and that’s what a Composable Website usually is. In actuality, this doesn’t mean there are no servers involved, there's always a physical server somewhere hosting your HTML. Composable Websites usually leverage web platforms to abstract the part where you have to manage your own servers. Otherwise, your website won’t be found on the web. Here’s where a Composable Web platform comes in.

What is a Composable Web hosting platform?

Well, it seems quite obvious: a Composable Web hosting platform allows you to host your Composable Website, doesn’t it? Yes, but its role isn’t limited to hosting! 

In the past, hosting providers had a single focus — hosting. Development flow was out of their concern. Now things have changed: a Composable Web hosting provider hosts your site and takes care of deployment and other issues like running edge functions and authorizing users. It connects to your git repository, where your static site generator sits, automatically deploys any changes you push, and puts the generated HTML files on a CDN. 

Composable Web platforms are quite different from the hosting providers of the past. Usually, Composable Web hosting platforms don’t host websites within their own infrastructure on a lower level but use underlying services like Google Cloud or AWS. Relying on such trusted cloud services makes your site inherently more stable, secure and scalable.

However, for most cases it's not wise to manage your own server infrastructure. Composable Web platform providers such as Vercel and Netlify manage the server infrastructure for you, thus saving you time and money. 

There are also many additional benefits to SaaS hosting platforms for Composable Web. Here, we dive deeper into those benefits, buckle up!

What to expect from a Composable Web hosting platform

Here, we curated a list of features a Composable Web hosting platform usually offers:

• Automated builds: Let’s say you’ve pushed some changes to your git repository. Before getting the changes deployed, you need them to be built. A Composable Web hosting platform fetches the new code and builds it upon each commit or pull request.

• Continuous deployment and integration (CI/CD pipeline): The code changes should be built and automatically deployed. That is, exposed to the users instantly. With continuous deployment and continuous delivery, no human intervention is needed; only a failed test will prevent the changes from being put into action. You're in full control of your deployment pipeline and changes to the source code are instantly deployed if so configured.

• Site previews: To increase the quality of the developer experience, a SaaS platform creates a unique URL to preview the changes for each new build. This way, your developer team can track any faulty changes. For example; Vercel lets you leave on page comments for developers and other team members to directly provide feedback within certain builds.

• Atomic deployments: A script continuously updates your website in the background while there’s zero downtime on your server. This way, your site stays up and running at all times. 

• Easy rollbacks: If a bug occurs, there is no need to make complicated reverts. To roll back, you can easily deploy any previous build to production. This is possible because each commit provides a snapshot of your site, and you always can always revert to a previous production state.

• Notifications: For each CI/CD event, like a successful or failed build, you can set a notification to be sent to your email or Slack. 

• CDN: A copy of your website lives on a distributed server network. This way, your website stays close to user locations and thus is served fast. Really fast. 

Now that we have explored the main features of a Composable Web platform, we can dive into the Vercel vs Netlify comparison. But first, we’ll say some words about these two providers.

What is Vercel?

Vercel is a Composable Web hosting platform that enables developers to deliver web projects quickly and efficiently. Just like Netlify, it provides a suite of build and deployment tools in addition to actual hosting.

• The company was founded in 2015 by the same folks who worked on the React-based development framework called Next.js. This is why a lot of Vercel’s serverless deployment tools are optimized to work with Next.js. 

• As of April, 2024, more than 640k websites are hosted on Vercel, and comprises 0.5% market share among web hosting providers. 1.93% of the top 10k websites opted for Vercel.

Vercel is one of the most widely used platform for hosting modern websites and applications.

What is Netlify?

Netlify, founded in 2014, is one of the most prominent Composable Web platforms for hosting, deploying, and automating modern web projects. When Netlify was founded, git-centered workflows were rapidly gaining popularity. The company aimed to provide a convenient cloud build and deploy tool for static site generators hosted on git.

• These days, Netlify offers a ton of functionalities and hosts more than 500k websites as of April 2024. This makes for a market share of 0.3% among all web hosting providers in the world. However, among the most popular 10k websites in the world, this number is higher — 2.54% of the top sites chose Netlify as a hosting provider.

• Many know that Netlify "invented" the Jamstack concept, but later, in 2023, rebranded the concept to just “flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability”; or as we like to call it, the Composable Web architecture.

Netlify is one of the pioneering platforms for hosting and deploying modern websites and apps. Netlify coined the term "Jamstack", but nowadays advertises itself as the platform for Composable Web.

Vercel vs Netlify:
how are they different?

The platforms are very similar in functionality, but sometimes, one wins over the other. Let’s look at the common points first and proceed to the differences after that.

Basic similarities

Firstly, both Vercel and Netlify provide all the features a serverless Composable Web hosting provider has to offer, which we described earlier.

Both platforms use git to fetch your project and support GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket version control providers. By default, your code is retrieved from the main branch, but you can also set the platforms to deploy the code from other branches, for instance, to have a staging environment for testing new features.

Vercel and Netlify are multi-cloud platforms, meaning they equally employ GCP and AWS for their infrastructure under the hood.

Other features that are equally good in both platforms are:

• UI: Dashboard design and visual tooling (albeit Vercel might be a bit more streamlined).

• Documentation and support: Both offer equal documentation and support.

• Domain and SSL certificate management: Both automatically generate and assign SSL certificates.

• Security: Both offer two-factor authentication, standard security, DDOS prevention and other security features you might expect from a modern web hosting platform.

• Compliance: Both comply with SOC2 and GDPR legislation as you might expect. Enterprise level compliance for data residency and other more advanced compliance features are sometimes included in Enterprise plans.

Key differences

When it comes to differences, one of the key ones is that Vercel is created by the company that also authored Next.js. And this framework supports not only static sites but also server-side rendering (SSR), so Vercel also hosts SSR-based websites. 

Other differences include the number of add-ons, extensions, and integrations the platforms offer. And here, Netlify is a clear winner as it offers more of such things. What’s better, most of them are available on the free tier.

Vercel’s clients can integrate third-party services via APIs to replace the missing functionality. While it’s doable, it’s still handier to operate the features native to your deployment pipeline.  However Vercel has introduced a lot of new features in the recent years that are up to par with Netlify, some of which are better (such as Analytics and Real-time performance monitoring).

Now let’s proceed to the feature-by-feature comparison. 

Sign-up

• Netlify: Netlify’s sign-up process is straightforward. In fact, you can set up a basic website infrastructure just in one hour. There’s no playing around with CDNs or SSL certificates — the service does everything for you.

• Vercel: The process is even easier for Vercel: you can put your site online and set up domain configuration in ten minutes, even from your phone! All you have to do is link your GitHub project to Vercel and specify which build commands to run.

Serverless functions

Serverless functions serve as a backend for your website. But with one major difference: scaling, security, and monitoring is none of your concern. In fact, serverless functions are HTTP API endpoints that are represented by separate functions, not a whole backend project. 

Serverless functions are placed in a specific folder in the same repo where your front-end lives. The hosting platform automatically detects and deploys them. Both Netlify and Vercel use AWS Lambda in the background for a serverless function.

But actually, Composable Websites don’t need any backend most of the time: everything is static, and all the data is retrieved at build time from a CMS. However, in some cases, you may still require custom server data processing: for instance, to avoid exposing sensitive API keys to the public when using Stripe API (they should be communicated via an API backend call).

The core differences in approach to serverless functions between Netlify and Vercel involve

• Asynchronous execution: Vercel serverless functions are synchronous by nature. Netlify offers “background functions,” which can run for up to 15 minutes asynchronously. You can use them for batch processing or web scraping.

• Edge caching: With Vercel's Edge caching, you don’t run the same function again and again — the results of the first function run will be cached periodically and retrieved from the cache on the consequent calls. This will come in handy if you’re regularly fetching something, say, current cryptocurrency prices. Plus, the feature is available on the free tier. Netlify offers “Edge handlers” with similar functionality, but the feature is still in the trial stage.

• Language support: Vercel offers more language choices. While Netlify supports only Typescript, JavaScript and Go for creating serverless Netlify functions, Vercel also supports Python and Ruby.

Both providers set the maximum function execution time to 10 seconds on the free tier and 60 seconds on the pro plan.

• Feature available in free-tier (both providers): yes, but generally pay as you go.

Analytics

• Netlify: Netlify Analytics is an easy-to-use, server-side solution for tracking your website’s visitors and performance. It allows you to gain insights into your audience without any performance drop and is fully compliant with GDPR. You can monitor page views, unique visitors, bandwidth used, top sources, and resources not found.

• Vercel: Vercel also has a similar tool allowing you to track Core Web Vitals (CWV), including loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Vercel’s analytics is implemented as a client-side JavaScript, making your site slower. The JS bundle depends on the framework you're using: currently, Next.js, Nuxt, and Gatsby are supported.

Both analytics methods provide some benefits compared to something like Google Analytics, as neither Vercel or Netlify use cookies for analytics. Instead, they use a combination of server-side and hash-based tracking methods that are lighter and more compliant than traditional tracking methods.

The key difference here is that Netlify’s analytics is purely server-side, so it doesn’t slow down your site.

• Feature available in free-tier (both providers): no, but Vercel has some quota even on the hobby plan, which is free.

• Netlify price: starting from $9 and then pay as you go.

• Vercel price: pay as you go, then $14.00 and up.

Forms

Netlify Forms make it easy to receive form submissions on your static site. You just need to enable the feature in the parameters of your form. This way, the form will be automatically detected and set up to receive submissions during deployment. The submitted data will be available in the Netlify dashboard. Additionally, you can export submissions as a CSV file.

Vercel lacks an integrated form solution. You have to go for a third-party service, like Formspree or Getform. But form services are really simple to integrate and add to websites hosted on Vercel, so this is not as huge of a deal.

• Feature available in free-tier (Netlify): Yes, 100 form submissions per month, then pay as you grow.

Access management and
deployment protection

• Access management: To restrict access to certain content and features within the platforms, you'll need to have your users authenticated and authorized on both Vercel and Netlify. Both platforms offer this on a level you might expect from a typical SaaS platform. Of course, if you're working with a larger team or organization you might need more advanced, role based authentication such as SAML SSO, which is available on both Vercel and Netlify on the Enterprise plans.

• Deployment protection: Sometimes you need to restrict access to specific deploys or previews to specific internal or external users (e.g. we as an agency need to share unfinished work with clients, but don't want this to be available publicly to everyone). Vercel and Netlify both offer password and user based deployment protection, however they are paid features on both platforms.

Split testing

Netlify lets you create A/B testing campaigns to optimize your site easily. It simply splits the traffic between the two branches you want to juxtapose. This way, you can compare performance metrics, i.e., conversion rate, between different feature implementations or client groups. What's more, there's no performance penalty, unlike popular alternatives such as Optimizely. However, at the time of writing this feature is still in Beta.

Split tests are made easy with Netlify.

Vercel does not offer a similar A/B testing feature that compares click-through and bounce rates and user conversion and engagement. You'll have to create your own solution, or utilize third-party services such as Optimizely. A/B tests are not difficult to create with Vercel, but are not integrated within the platform.

CLI

As an addition to an online dashboard, both platforms feature CLIs. So, developers can accomplish most of the tasks directly in their terminal. One thing to mention is that Vercel CLI works exceptionally well with Next.js projects. 

• Feature available in free-tier (both providers): yes

Performance

Keep in mind, though that the performance of both Vercel and Netlify can vary depending on a variety of factors, such as the complexity of the site, the size of the assets, the location of the user, and more.

Test both platforms with your specific requirements to determine which one performs better for your needs. When implemented correctly, both platforms are equal in terms of performance.

If you're using Next.js, Vercel will probably be better optimized than Netlify due to the fact that Vercel has developed Next.js themselves.

Integrations

Both Vercel and Netlify offer integrations with popular Git repositories like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, as well as continuous integration and delivery. They also support serverless functions, custom domains, SSL certificates, CDN, form handling, and analytics.

When it comes to Headless CMSs, both platforms offer integrations with third-party services. Vercel supports Sanity.io, Contentful, and Strapi, while Netlify supports Contentful, Sanity.io, DatoCMS, and more.

Vercel also supports static site generators like Next.js, Gatsby, Hugo, and more, while Netlify supports Hugo, Jekyll, Middleman, and more.

Both platforms offer robust integrations and add-ons, but it's up to you to choose the one you like best and that fits your specific style.

Limitations

Pricing and plans

Now that we’re done with the feature-by-feature comparison, let’s look at pricing. Spoiler: the number of features offered within specific plans may vary, but the cost differences aren’t quite significant. 

A major thing to know is that, unlike Vercel, Netlify allows you to deploy commercial projects within the free tier. While Vercel doesn’t really prevent you from misusing their free tier, they may block you from further platform use if they find out. 

Both Netlify and Vercel offer 100 GB bandwidth on the free tier and up to 1 TB on the Pro plan. While Vercel features 6000 build minutes per month, Netlify provides only 300, but it’s still enough for most cases. And you can purchase some extra 500 build minutes for $7.

Netlify Pro costs $20 per month, and Vercel Pro costs $20 per month. Netlify also gives you a business offer for $99 per month with unlimited form submissions, identity users, large media transformations, and analytics. 

Here are the plan information tables so that you can compare the plans yourself. 

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Conclusion

Vercel and Netlify are both great hosting platforms for Composable Web. To choose between them, you have to define the scope of your project and define your specific requirements for your use case. Say, if you’re developing a small-to-midsize website, you should opt for the provider with the free tier features fulfilling your goals, keeping in mind the how well the chosen platform scales with your needs.

I would say go with Netlify if you are creating a small project like a blog. Plenty of services come out of the box, and Netlify’s free tier allows commercial use. 

However, bigger projects, especially on Next.js may have more specific requirements, so you may opt for Vercel combined with third-party services for authentication, forms, and other needs.

Also, if you’re developing your project with Next.js, Vercel is a great option because all the tools, like CLI, are tailored to work seamlessly with Next.js. Generally, Vercel is a bit more friendlier for a CLI based workflow, while Netlify is more suited for a UI based approach.

One last thing to consider is serverless functions: Vercel features Edge caching, while Netlify Edge offers asynchronous procedures. So if you’re planning to execute the same Edge function repeatedly, Vercel should be your choice. Alternatively, if you need background processing, go with Netlify.

Whatever you choose, try to get the most out of your Composable Web hosting platform, we hope this guides gives you a better overview of the two and helps you make educated decisions.