App hosting and PaaS

Vercel vs Netlify

Vercel bills a $20 Pro plan plus metered usage and bans commercial use on its free plan; Netlify pools everything into credits, from a capped free tier to $9 Personal and $20 Pro.

§1

The short answer

Both build from Git, give every pull request a preview URL and serve from a global CDN. The difference is how you pay. Vercel Pro lists $20 a month with 1 TB of transfer and 10M edge requests included, then meters each resource, for example $0.15/GB of transfer and $0.60 per 1M invocations. Netlify turns everything into credits: 20 per GB of bandwidth, 15 per production deploy and 10 per GB-hour of compute, while deploy previews use none.

The free plans differ in kind. Vercel Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use only, so a paying product needs Pro from day one. Netlify Free has no such rule but a hard 300-credit cap, roughly 15 GB of bandwidth; when the credits run out, projects pause until the next cycle.

Vercel has the most complete Next.js support and server runtimes for Node.js, Bun, Python, Go, Ruby and Rust. Netlify bundles forms, Blob storage and managed Postgres on every plan, and its Pro plan has unlimited members.

Choose Vercel if

You build with Next.js and want features such as ISR and middleware to work fully
You need server functions in Python, Go, Ruby or Rust as well as Node.js
You want 1 TB of transfer included and a published unit price for every metered resource

Choose Netlify if

Your project is commercial but small enough for 300 free credits a month
You want built-in forms, Blob storage and Postgres without another vendor
You want unlimited team members on the $20 Pro plan

§2

Side by side

	Vercel	Netlify
Stages	HobbyIndieStartupScale-upEnterprise	HobbyIndieStartupScale-upEnterprise
What it is	Frontend and serverless platform	Frontend and serverless platform
From	Pro from $20/mo plus usage	Personal from $9/mo
Free tier	Hobby: personal non-commercial use only; 100 GB fast data transfer, 1M edge requests, 1M function invocations, 4 active CPU-hours and 360 GB-hrs memory per month, 200 projects. Exceeding a limit pauses the feature until 30 days pass.	300 credits a month with a hard limit (roughly 15 GB of bandwidth if spent on nothing else, at 20 credits per GB). Unlimited deploy previews, custom domains with SSL, functions, database and Blob storage. Projects pause when credits run out; no extra credits can be bought.
Runs	Node.js, Bun, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, Wasm, Edge	Static sites; JavaScript/TypeScript functions
Free tier sleeps?	Serverless, scales to zero (functions)	Serverless functions; free projects pause at credit cap
Managed DBs	Blob storage; databases via Marketplace partners	Netlify Database (managed Postgres), Blobs
Regions	Global CDN; functions in one region (iad1) by default	Global CDN, 100+ edge locations
Open source	No	No
Self-hostable	No	No
EU data residency	Available	Not stated
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR DPA	SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR DPA
Checked	28 Sept 2026	28 Sept 2026
Strengths	Preview URLs for every pull request with no setup. The most complete support for Next.js features such as ISR and middleware. Free DDoS mitigation and a WAF on every plan. Clear published unit prices for every metered resource.	Free, unlimited deploy previews on every plan. Built-in forms, Blob storage and Postgres without a third-party account. Pro has unlimited team members instead of per-seat fees. Hard credit cap on Free means the free plan can never bill you.
Limitations	The Hobby plan may not be used for commercial projects. Hobby runtime logs are kept for only one hour; Pro keeps one day. Functions run in one region by default; multi-region functions need Pro or Enterprise. No long-running servers or first-party SQL database; stateful backends live elsewhere.	When credits run out, every project on the team is paused and shows 'Site not available' unless auto recharge is enabled. Each production deploy costs 15 credits, so frequent deploys eat the allowance. The Free plan cannot buy extra credits or add team members. Switching from a legacy plan to a credit-based plan cannot be undone.

Sources: Vercel pricing, Netlify pricing. Full plans on each tool's page.

§3

Plans

Vercel

Hobby Personal, non-commercial projects; 100 GB transfer, 1M invocations	$0/mo
Pro 1 TB transfer and 10M edge requests included, then usage-based; team features, email support	$20/mo
Enterprise SLAs, audit logs, directory sync, HIPAA support, custom limits	Custom

Netlify

Free 300 credits/month, hard limit	$0/mo
Personal 1,000 credits, 1-day observability, priority email support; 500 extra credits for $5	$9/mo
Pro 3,000 credits, unlimited members, 3+ concurrent builds; tiers up to 20,000 credits ($126/mo)	$20/mo
Enterprise 99.99% SLA, SSO and SCIM, log drains, 24/7 support	Custom

Compare all app hosting and paas →