What is Vercel and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Vercel
- Heroku
Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling. ...
- Netlify
Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment. ...
- AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security. ...
- DigitalOcean
We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel. ...
- Firebase
Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds. ...
- Serverless
Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more. ...
- GitHub Pages
Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live. ...
- Firebase Hosting
It is production-grade web content hosting for developers. With a single command, you can quickly deploy web apps and serve both static and dynamic content to a global CDN (content delivery network). You can also pair it with Cloud Functions or Cloud Run to build and host microservices. ...
Vercel alternatives & related posts
Heroku
- Easy deployment704
- Free for side projects459
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup190
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups150
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting48
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment19
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Easy integration15
- Great customer support12
- GitHub integration8
- Painless & well documented6
- No-ops6
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project4
- Free4
- Great UI3
- Just works3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- MySQL extension2
- Security1
- Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot1
- Sec0
- Super expensive24
- Not a whole lot of flexibility7
- No usable MySQL option5
- Storage5
- Low performance on free tier4
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month1
related Heroku posts











StackShare Feed is built entirely with React, Glamorous, and Apollo. One of our objectives with the public launch of the Feed was to enable a Server-side rendered (SSR) experience for our organic search traffic. When you visit the StackShare Feed, and you aren't logged in, you are delivered the Trending feed experience. We use an in-house Node.js rendering microservice to generate this HTML. This microservice needs to run and serve requests independent of our Rails web app. Up until recently, we had a mono-repo with our Rails and React code living happily together and all served from the same web process. In order to deploy our SSR app into a Heroku environment, we needed to split out our front-end application into a separate repo in GitHub. The driving factor in this decision was mostly due to limitations imposed by Heroku specifically with how processes can't communicate with each other. A new SSR app was created in Heroku and linked directly to the frontend repo so it stays in-sync with changes.
Related to this, we need a way to "deploy" our frontend changes to various server environments without building & releasing the entire Ruby application. We built a hybrid Amazon S3 Amazon CloudFront solution to host our Webpack bundles. A new CircleCI script builds the bundles and uploads them to S3. The final step in our rollout is to update some keys in Redis so our Rails app knows which bundles to serve. The result of these efforts were significant. Our frontend team now moves independently of our backend team, our build & release process takes only a few minutes, we are now using an edge CDN to serve JS assets, and we have pre-rendered React pages!
#StackDecisionsLaunch #SSR #Microservices #FrontEndRepoSplit
























Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Netlify
- Easy deploy43
- Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments42
- Super simple deploys21
- Free SSL support21
- Easy Setup and Continous deployments15
- Free plan for personal websites9
- Faster than any other option in the market9
- Deploy previews7
- Free Open Source (Pro) plan6
- Easy to use and great support4
- Analytics4
- Great loop-in material on a blog4
- Great drag and drop functionality3
- Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments3
- Custom domains support2
- Canary Releases (Split Tests)1
- Tech oriented support1
- Supports static site generators1
- It's expensive7
- Bandwidth limitation1
related Netlify posts
I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.
I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!
I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.
Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.
Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.
With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.
If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.
Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.
My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.
AWS Lambda
- No infrastructure128
- Cheap82
- Quick69
- Stateless58
- No deploy, no server, great sleep47
- AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it9
- Easy to deploy6
- Extensive API6
- Auto scale and cost effective6
- Event Driven Governance6
- VPC Support5
- Integrated with various AWS services3
- Cant execute ruby or go5
- Compute time limited1
- Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort0
related AWS Lambda posts









Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.
We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient
Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:
We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.
We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.
In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.
Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.
In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!











Heroku Docker GitHub Node.js hapi Vue.js AWS Lambda Amazon S3 PostgreSQL Knex.js Checkly is a fairly young company and we're still working hard to find the correct mix of product features, price and audience.
We are focussed on tech B2B, but I always wanted to serve solo developers too. So I decided to make a $7 plan.
Why $7? Simply put, it seems to be a sweet spot for tech companies: Heroku, Docker, Github, Appoptics (Librato) all offer $7 plans. They must have done a ton of research into this, so why not piggy back that and try it out.
Enough biz talk, onto tech. The challenges were:
- Slice of a portion of the functionality so a $7 plan is still profitable. We call this the "plan limits"
- Update API and back end services to handle and enforce plan limits.
- Update the UI to kindly state plan limits are in effect on some part of the UI.
- Update the pricing page to reflect all changes.
- Keep the actual processing backend, storage and API's as untouched as possible.
In essence, we went from strictly volume based pricing to value based pricing. Here come the technical steps & decisions we made to get there.
- We updated our PostgreSQL schema so plans now have an array of "features". These are string constants that represent feature toggles.
- The Vue.js frontend reads these from the vuex store on login.
- Based on these values, the UI has simple
v-if
statements to either just show the feature or show a friendly "please upgrade" button. - The hapi API has a hook on each relevant API endpoint that checks whether a user's plan has the feature enabled, or not.
Side note: We offer 10 SMS messages per month on the developer plan. However, we were not actually counting how many people were sending. We had to update our alerting daemon (that runs on Heroku and triggers SMS messages via AWS SNS) to actually bump a counter.
What we build is basically feature-toggling based on plan features. It is very extensible for future additions. Our scheduling and storage backend that actually runs users' monitoring requests (AWS Lambda) and stores the results (S3 and Postgres) has no knowledge of all of this and remained unchanged.
Hope this helps anyone building out their SaaS and is in a similar situation.
DigitalOcean
- Great value for money559
- Simple dashboard364
- Good pricing362
- Ssds300
- Nice ui250
- Easy configuration192
- Great documentation155
- Ssh access138
- Great community135
- Ubuntu24
- Docker13
- IPv6 support12
- Private networking10
- 99.99% uptime SLA8
- Simple API7
- Great tutorials7
- 55 Second Provisioning6
- One Click Applications5
- Dokku4
- Node.js4
- Debian4
- CoreOS4
- LAMP4
- LEMP3
- Ghost3
- Simple Control Panel3
- Word Press3
- 1Gb/sec Servers3
- Quick and no nonsense service2
- Speed2
- Mean2
- Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD s2
- Django2
- Runs CoreOS2
- Good Tutorials2
- GitLab2
- Ruby on Rails2
- CentOS1
- Spaces1
- KVM Virtualization1
- Amazing Hardware1
- Transfer Globally1
- Fedora1
- FreeBSD1
- Drupal1
- FreeBSD Amp1
- Magento1
- ownCloud1
- RedMine1
- My go to server provider1
- Ease and simplicity1
- Nice1
- Find it superfitting with my requirements (SSD, ssh.1
- Easy Setup1
- Cheap1
- Static IP1
- It's the easiest to get started for small projects1
- Automatic Backup1
- Great support1
- Quick and easy to set up1
- Servers on demand - literally1
- Reliability1
- Variety of services0
- Managed Kubernetes0
- Pricing3
- No live support chat3
related DigitalOcean posts
Hello, I'm currently writing an e-commerce website with Laravel and Laravel Nova (as an admin panel). I want to start deploying the app and created a DigitalOcean account. After some searches about the deployment process, I saw that the setup via DigitalOcean (using Droplets) isn't very easy for beginners. Now I'm not sure how to deploy my app. I am in between Laravel Forge and DigitalOcean (?Apps Platform or Droplets?). I've read that Heroku and Laravel Vapor are a bit expensive. That's why I didn't consider them yet. I'd be happy to read your opinions on that topic!
Hi, I'm a beginner at using MySQL, I currently deployed my crud app on Heroku using the ClearDB add-on. I didn't see that coming, but the increased value of the primary key instead of being 1 is set to 10, and I cannot find a way to change it. Now I`m considering switching and deploying the full app and MySql to DigitalOcean any advice on that? Will I get the same issue? Thanks in advance!
- Realtime backend made easy367
- Fast and responsive268
- Easy setup239
- Real-time212
- JSON188
- Free132
- Backed by google126
- Angular adaptor82
- Reliable67
- Great customer support35
- Great documentation30
- Real-time synchronization25
- Mobile friendly21
- Rapid prototyping18
- Great security14
- Automatic scaling12
- Freakingly awesome11
- Chat8
- Angularfire is an amazing addition!8
- Super fast development8
- Ios adaptor6
- Firebase hosting6
- Awesome next-gen backend6
- Built in user auth/oauth6
- Speed of light4
- Very easy to use4
- Brilliant for startups3
- Great3
- It's made development super fast3
- Low battery consumption2
- Free hosting2
- Cloud functions2
- Push notification2
- JS Offline and Sync suport2
- Free authentication solution2
- The concurrent updates create a great experience2
- I can quickly create static web apps with no backend2
- Great all-round functionality2
- Easy Reactjs integration1
- Easy to use1
- Free SSL1
- CDN & cache out of the box1
- Faster workflow1
- Google's support1
- .net1
- Serverless1
- Good Free Limits1
- Large1
- Can become expensive31
- No open source, you depend on external company15
- Scalability is not infinite15
- Not Flexible Enough9
- Cant filter queries6
- No Relational Data3
- Very unstable server3
- No offline sync2
- Too many errors2
related Firebase posts
Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.
My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.



























This is my stack in Application & Data
JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB
My Utilities Tools
Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch
My Devops Tools
Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack
My Business Tools
Slack
Serverless
- API integration12
- Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM7
- Lower cost2
- Openwhisk1
- Auto scale1
related Serverless posts






















We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.
To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas
To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS
#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless
At Epsagon, we use hundreds of AWS Lambda functions, most of them are written in Python, and the Serverless Framework to pack and deploy them. One of the issues we've encountered is the difficulty to package external libraries into the Lambda environment using the Serverless Framework. This limitation is probably by design since the external code your Lambda needs can be usually included with a package manager.
In order to overcome this issue, we've developed a tool, which we also published as open-source (see link below), which automatically packs these libraries using a simple npm package and a YAML configuration file. Support for Node.js, Go, and Java will be available soon.
The GitHub respoitory: https://github.com/epsagon/serverless-package-external
- Free288
- Right out of github217
- Quick to set up185
- Instant108
- Easy to learn107
- Great way of setting up your project's website58
- Widely used47
- Quick and easy41
- Great documentation37
- Super easy4
- Easy setup3
- Instant and fast Jekyll builds2
- Great customer support2
- Great integration2
- Not possible to perform HTTP redirects4
- Supports only Jekyll3
- Limited Jekyll plugins3
- Jekyll is bloated1
related GitHub Pages posts
























Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.
I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.
Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map
- Integration with firebase4
- Analytics1
- Super simple deploys1
- Easy deployment1