Vercel and Netlify solve the same problem for the same kind of team, and choosing between them used to come down to taste. That changed. Netlify moved its free tier to a credit system, and Vercel’s free tier carries a restriction that rules out a large share of the sites people try to put on it. Neither change is hidden, and both are easy to miss. Figures below come from each company’s own pricing and documentation pages, checked on 8 September 2026.
The short version
Choose Vercel if you build with Next.js and your project is personal or your company will pay per seat. The framework integration is genuinely first-party and nothing else matches it.
Choose Netlify if you want a free tier you can use commercially, or if your team is large and you do not want to pay for every member. Netlify charges per plan; Vercel charges per developer.
Choose neither if you do not use Git. Both are built around a repository. Both offer a drag-and-drop path, and on both it is a side door rather than the main entrance.
The free tiers, in detail
This is where the two have diverged most, and where most outdated comparisons will mislead you.
Netlify: 300 credits a month. One allowance covers everything. A production deploy costs 15 credits. Bandwidth costs 20 credits per gigabyte. Web requests cost 2 credits per 10,000. So 300 credits is about twenty deploys, or fifteen gigabytes of traffic, or some mixture — not each separately. On the free plan you cannot buy more, and when the allowance is gone your sites are paused: visitors see a “Site not available” page until the month resets.
Vercel: generous limits, non-commercial only. The Hobby plan includes 1 million edge requests and 100 GB of data transfer a month, which is far more headroom than most small sites need. The catch is the rule attached to it: Hobby is restricted to non-commercial, personal use. A company brochure site, a client landing page, or a portfolio with a shop does not qualify. Hobby also cannot connect a repository owned by a Git organisation.
| Free tier | Netlify | Vercel |
|---|---|---|
| Allowance | 300 credits per month, shared across deploys and bandwidth | 1M edge requests, 100 GB transfer |
| Commercial use | Allowed | Not allowed |
| When you exceed it | Sites paused until the month resets | Usage limits enforced; upgrade required |
| Custom domain | Yes, free SSL | Yes, free SSL |
| Sites or projects | Unlimited in name, bounded by credits | 200 projects |
| Git organisation repos | Allowed | Not on Hobby |
Netlify’s pauses your site when you run out. Vercel’s does not allow commercial use in the first place. Those are the two failure modes worth planning around, and neither is about performance.
What the first paid plan costs
The headline prices look close. The billing models are not.
Netlify Personal is $9 a month for 1,000 credits, and Pro is $20 a month with unlimited members and a larger credit allowance. Extra credits can be topped up — $5 for 500 on Personal, $10 for 1,500 on Pro.
Vercel Pro is $20 per user per month. That is per developer seat, not per team. Viewer seats are free, but anyone who deploys is a paid seat. For one person the two are comparable; for a five-person studio, Netlify Pro is $20 and Vercel Pro is $100.
Both exclude tax, and both bill usage beyond the included allowance on top of the subscription.
Drag-and-drop on both
Both platforms will take a folder without a repository, and the two implementations behave differently in a way that matters if you plan to update the site.
Netlify Drop takes a folder or ZIP in the browser. You do not need an account to deploy, only to claim the site afterwards. Deploys under 50 MB are recommended, and individual files over 10 MB can block the deploy.
Vercel Drop also takes a file, folder or ZIP with no Git and no CLI. The important limitation: every drop creates a new project. You cannot re-drop a folder to update an existing site, which makes it a publishing tool rather than a hosting workflow.
On both, the drag-and-drop path is a way in, not a way of working. Neither company designed it to be how you run a site for the next two years.
How to choose between them
You use Next.js. Vercel. It is Vercel’s own framework and the integration shows in the details others cannot match.
You need a free tier for anything commercial. Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages. Vercel’s Hobby plan is not an option, regardless of how small the site is.
Your team has more than two people who deploy. Netlify. Per-seat pricing gets expensive faster than most teams estimate.
Your traffic is spiky or unpredictable. Neither free tier is comfortable — Netlify pauses, Vercel meters. Cloudflare Pages does not charge for static bandwidth at all, which is the honest recommendation for that case.
When neither is the right answer
There is a category of site both platforms serve badly, and it is a large one: the finished folder. A portfolio, a landing page, a brochure site, something an AI tool produced. No framework, no build step, nothing to compile.
For that site, everything Vercel and Netlify are good at is overhead. Build minutes, preview deployments, edge functions and framework detection are all solving problems you do not have, and the pricing you inherit is designed around those problems.
That is the gap sofast was built for: you drag the folder in, it is live in about fifteen seconds with your own domain and an automatic SSL certificate, and the next update is the same drag. Plans start at $5 a month for two sites, with no free tier and no non-commercial restriction to read carefully. If you are running a Next.js application, use Vercel — this is not that.
Common questions
The answers below cover credits, commercial use, moving between the two, team pricing and the alternatives.
For one developer they are close: Netlify Personal is $9 a month and Pro is $20, against Vercel Pro at $20. For a team the answer is clear — Vercel charges $20 per developer seat while Netlify Pro includes unlimited members, so a five-person team pays $100 against $20 for comparable plans.
On the free plan, the sites on your account are paused and visitors see a “Site not available” message until the monthly allowance resets. You cannot buy more credits on the free plan. On paid plans you can top up, so the site stays online and the cost goes up instead.
No. The Hobby plan is explicitly restricted to non-commercial, personal use, and that includes a company’s own brochure site or a client landing page. The next tier is Pro at $20 per user per month. Netlify and Cloudflare Pages both allow commercial use on their free tiers.
For a static site, no — both deploy from the same repository, so it is mostly connecting the repo to the other platform and moving the DNS records. Redirects, environment variables and any serverless functions are the parts that need attention, since each platform configures them differently.
Not strictly. Netlify Drop and Vercel Drop both accept a folder in the browser. But both platforms are designed around a repository, and on Vercel each drop creates a separate project rather than updating an existing site. If you never intend to use Git, a host built for uploads will fit better than either.
Cloudflare Pages Direct Upload if you want free and do not mind moving your domain to Cloudflare’s nameservers. GitHub Pages if you are willing to learn a little Git. A drag-and-drop host such as sofast or Static.app if you want updating the site to stay a single action — those start around $5 a month.
If your site came out of an AI tool rather than a build pipeline, these guides cover the export and the upload.
