Netlify vs Vercel for Hosting a Small Site

If your project is a personal or hobby site, either free tier works; if it's a small business or client site you plan to make money from, check Vercel's Hobby-plan terms before you pick it, since Vercel documents that plan as non-commercial only. Netlify and Vercel both do the same basic job — connect a Git repository, build it, deploy it to a global CDN with a free subdomain and HTTPS — and most people exporting an AI-built project or a codebase from a website builder just need one of the two. This checks each vendor's own current pricing and docs pages: free-plan limits, custom domains, frameworks, and forms/functions, and who each is not for.

Who is this comparison for?

Someone hosting an exported static site, an AI-builder codebase (from Lovable, Bolt, or v0), or a small framework project who needs a place to deploy it that isn't a full cloud provider. If you're publishing a Figma design instead of managing a codebase, that's a different job — see how AI builder exports move to your own hosting and moving a Lovable project to your own hosting for the builder-specific export steps, and come back here once you have a repository to deploy.

What does each free plan actually include?

Netlify's Free plan runs on a credit system: 300 credits per month, where a production deploy costs 15 credits, bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB, and forms submissions are free on every plan (Netlify Docs, "How credits work", checked September 2026). Netlify's own pricing page lists "Custom domains with SSL" and "Functions & AI models" as included on Free (Netlify, "Pricing and Plans", checked September 2026). Crucially, Netlify's own blog post introducing this plan states plainly: "On the Free plan, you can deploy commercial projects, personal sites, or other creative explorations you want to share on the web" (Netlify, "Introducing Netlify's Free plan", checked September 2026) — commercial use is explicitly allowed, the limit is the credit allowance, not the type of project.

Vercel's Hobby plan documents a different, larger set of specific included quotas: 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 10 GB of Fast Origin Transfer, 1,000,000 Edge Requests, 4 CPU-hours of Active CPU, and 1,000,000 Function Invocations per month, among others (Vercel Docs, "Vercel Hobby Plan", checked September 2026). The same page states outright: "the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only." That single sentence is the biggest practical difference between the two free tiers for anyone hosting a client's or a business's site rather than a personal project.

Which frameworks does each one support?

Both detect and build a wide range of frameworks with no manual configuration. Netlify's frameworks documentation lists Next.js (with "App Router, SSR, ISR, middleware, image optimization, and more — with zero configuration"), Astro, Remix, React Router, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Gatsby, Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, and several others with their exact build command and publish directory documented per framework (Netlify Docs, "Frameworks", checked September 2026).

Vercel's own framing is broader rather than a fixed list: "Vercel has first-class support for a wide range of the most popular frameworks... You can build and deploy using frontend, backend, and full-stack frameworks ranging from SvelteKit to Nitro, often without any upfront configuration" (Vercel Docs, "Frameworks on Vercel", checked September 2026). Vercel's own infrastructure support matrix on that page shows Next.js with the deepest feature coverage (Streaming SSR, Incremental Static Regeneration, native Image Optimization, and Runtime Cache all marked supported), with other frameworks like SvelteKit, Nuxt, and Astro supporting most but not every row in that same table — Vercel is the company behind Next.js, and its own comparison table reflects that Next.js gets first access to newer platform features.

In practice: if your project is a Next.js app, Vercel's own docs show it as the most fully supported framework on the platform. For most other common frameworks — Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt, a static site, or a plain Vite build — both platforms document real, current, zero-config support.

What about forms and serverless functions?

Netlify Forms is a built-in feature with no separate service required: "Netlify's serverless form handling allows you to manage forms without extra API calls or additional JavaScript... our build system automatically parse[s] your HTML at deploy time" (Netlify Docs, "Form setup", checked September 2026), and submissions don't consume credits on the credit-based plans. Netlify Functions support JavaScript and TypeScript directly, plus Go through a Lambda-compatible API (Netlify Docs, "Get started with Functions", checked September 2026).

Vercel has no built-in form-handling product comparable to Netlify Forms; a form on Vercel is typically wired to a Vercel Function you write yourself, or a third-party form service. Vercel Functions run server-side code with documented "Multi-runtime support" — "Use Node.js, Python, Go, and more" — and are described as built for "API routes, webhooks, streamed model responses, and agent turns" (Vercel Docs, "Vercel Functions", checked September 2026).

If you want a form to just work with no backend code, Netlify's built-in Forms is the more direct route. If you're already writing an API route as part of your app, Vercel Functions cover that the same way Netlify Functions do.

What is each one not for?

Netlify is not for a project that needs Vercel's deepest, first-party Next.js feature set (Vercel's own comparison table shows some of those rows unsupported or not-applicable on other frameworks, and Netlify is a separate company optimizing for framework-agnostic deploys rather than one framework specifically). It's also not the place to run a large commercial site without checking your actual monthly credit usage against the 300-credit Free allowance first — a site with meaningful traffic and frequent deploys will cross that limit and need a paid plan.

Vercel is not for a small business, client, or otherwise commercial site on the free Hobby tier — Vercel's own docs state that plan is personal use only, so a for-profit project belongs on Vercel Pro, not Hobby, regardless of how little traffic it gets. It also has no built-in form handling comparable to Netlify's, so budget for a form service or your own function if that matters to your project.

Where does this fit with an exported or AI-built project?

If your codebase came out of an AI builder, both Netlify and Vercel are documented, current deploy targets. Lovable's own docs list Vercel and Netlify side by side among platforms that "connect directly to your GitHub repository and automatically build and deploy on each push" (Lovable Documentation, "Deploying and hosting outside Lovable", referenced via our Lovable hosting guide), and v0 projects run on Vercel by default with a documented path to a custom domain through the Vercel dashboard (our guide to moving Bolt or v0 projects to your own hosting covers that setup). Neither vendor comparison changes the underlying checklist from those guides: re-enter your environment variables and secrets on whichever host you pick, confirm your database connects independently of the builder, and update OAuth callback URLs before you cut traffic over.

Figment doesn't compete in this space directly — a site published from a Figma design through Figment is hosted on Figment's own infrastructure by default, with a custom domain available on paid plans, or exported as HTML/CSS on Pro and Studio if you'd rather self-host it on Netlify or Vercel yourself.

Bottom line: for a personal or hobby project, either free tier is a reasonable choice, and the frameworks and functions on each are close enough that the decision often comes down to which dashboard you prefer. For anything commercial, Vercel's own Hobby-plan terms rule it out for that tier specifically — check Vercel Pro's pricing instead, or use Netlify's Free plan, which documents commercial use as allowed.