Backend and hosting
Netlify vs Vercel
Both can deploy a site from Git and give reviewers a preview URL. Compare how your actual routes, functions, and environment settings behave on each host.
Documentation reviewed
At a glance
| What to compare | Netlify | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| Preview workflow | Deploy Previews give pull requests and merge requests their own review URLs. | Preview deployments use a separate environment from production and can be created from non-production branches. |
| Production configuration | Check your Netlify build settings, deploy contexts, and any rules in netlify.toml or _redirects. | Check project environment variables, framework settings, and how redirects are declared in your framework or vercel.json. |
| Plan and usage | Check whether the account uses credit-based pricing and estimate credits for deploys, traffic, and compute. | Check whether the project fits the non-commercial Hobby plan or needs a paid plan and usage budget. |
| What to prototype | Build a preview that uses your existing redirects and functions and check its output against production. | Preview the same routes and check your framework output, server functions, and caching before moving the domain. |
Which should you use?
Choose Netlify if…
Your site already relies on Netlify redirects, functions, or deploy contexts and you want to keep that setup.
Choose Vercel if…
You maintain a Next.js project and want to test its rendering and preview workflow on the platform from the framework’s maintainers.
Before you switch
Run a preview on the destination host first. Check redirects, dynamic URLs, forms, and function calls with non-production credentials. Point the production domain at the new host after those checks.
Common questions
- Do both Netlify and Vercel support preview URLs?
- Yes. Both offer previews for changes from Git. Verify who can access the preview and which environment variables it receives.
- Will Netlify redirect files work on Vercel?
- Port the rules into Vercel or framework configuration and test status codes, route precedence, and query strings.