Vercel vs Netlify: which should you use?

01Side by side

02Pricing in practice

Vercel's pricing page lists Hobby at $0 for personal, non-commercial use and Pro at $20 a month including $20 of usage credit, with on-demand rates beyond that. Netlify's pricing is credit-based: Free has 300 credits, Personal is $9 for 1,000 credits and Pro is $20 for 3,000.

Netlify's credits are easy to reason about once you know the rates from its credit documentation: 15 credits per production deploy, 20 per GB of bandwidth, 2 per 10,000 requests. On the free plan, 300 credits is 20 deploys with no traffic, or 15 GB of bandwidth with no deploys, so a site you redeploy daily will run out.

03When to pick Vercel

• Your site uses Next.js features such as server components, image optimization or incremental regeneration.
• You are building an app with API routes and serverless functions.
• You will pay for Pro anyway, so the Hobby rules do not matter.
• You want the newest Next.js features on day one.

04When to pick Netlify

• A static or Jamstack site built with Astro, Hugo, Eleventy or plain HTML.
• You want forms without a third-party service.
• You need a free plan for a small business site and deploy infrequently.
• You want a hard spending cap so traffic spikes can never produce a bill.

05Migrating between them

Both deploy from a Git repository, so switching is mostly connecting the repository to the other host, copying environment variables and updating DNS. Platform-specific features are what tie you in: Netlify Forms and redirects files, or Vercel-specific edge configuration. Keep those to a minimum if you want to stay portable.

Cloudflare is the third option many compare, with generous free limits and commercial use allowed; Cloudflare Pages vs Vercel covers it, and how to host a website for free compares all the free plans. How to deploy a website covers the deploy itself.

06Spending controls and surprise bills

The two handle overages differently. Netlify's Free plan is a hard cap: when the 300 credits are used, projects pause until the next cycle, which means no bill but also a site that goes offline. Paid Netlify plans can top up credits. Vercel Pro includes $20 of usage and then bills on-demand rates, so a traffic spike costs money rather than taking the site down; set spend alerts and limits in the dashboard on day one.

Which is better depends on the site. For a hobby project, a pause is fine. For a business, downtime is usually worse than a modest overage, so a paid plan with alerts is the safer setup on either platform.

Developer experience is close. Both have clear build logs, instant rollbacks, preview URLs per pull request and CLIs. Teams that already use Next.js heavily tend to prefer Vercel's integration; teams on Astro, Hugo or Eleventy are equally at home on Netlify.