Vercel Review 2025: I Deployed 14 Projects to Test Every Claim

Test Methodology and Setup

I want to be upfront about how I approached this review because I think it matters. Most deployment platform reviews are written after somebody spins up a demo project, deploys it once, and writes about how nice the dashboard looks. That is fine for first impressions, but it tells you almost nothing about what happens when you are six months deep, your traffic spikes at 3am, and your bill arrives looking nothing like the pricing page suggested.

So here is what I actually did. Over six months starting in August 2024, I deployed 14 distinct projects to Vercel and tracked everything. I kept a spreadsheet. I timed builds with a stopwatch (well, a script -- but same energy). I ran latency tests from five different geographic regions using a mix of Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and custom curl timing scripts. I monitored my bills down to the cent. I intentionally broke things to see how fast I could recover. I also deployed the same projects to Netlify and Cloudflare Pages as controls, though I will not spend most of this review on those comparisons.

The 14 projects broke down like this: four Next.js apps (a SaaS dashboard, a marketing site, an e-commerce storefront, and a documentation site), two Astro sites (a blog and a portfolio), two SvelteKit apps, one Remix app, one Nuxt app, one plain static HTML site, one Gatsby blog that I refused to let die, and two API-only projects using serverless functions. This spread gave me a pretty good cross-section of what real developers actually deploy.

What Vercel Actually Is (Without the Marketing)

Strip away the buzz and Vercel is a deployment pipeline with a CDN attached to it. You point it at a Git repo, it watches for pushes, it builds your project, and it puts the result on a global network of servers. It does this very, very well. That is the pitch, and after 14 projects, I can say the pitch is accurate.

The company was founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 under the name ZEIT, rebranded to Vercel in 2020, and has been on a growth streak ever since. They also make Next.js, which is both their biggest advantage and the source of most criticism lobbed at them. More on that later.

Beyond the deployment basics, Vercel now offers serverless functions, edge functions, a key-value store, Postgres databases, blob storage, analytics, and speed monitoring. It has grown from "deploy your frontend" to "here is a whole platform" over the past two years. Whether you need all of that depends on your project, but having it available in the same dashboard is genuinely convenient when you do.

Build Time Benchmarks

Here is where having 14 projects pays off. I timed every build over a two-week period in January 2025 and took the average. These are production builds, not preview deployments.

The Next.js SaaS dashboard (about 120 pages, heavy dependencies, Prisma ORM, Tailwind CSS) averaged 47 seconds from push to live. The marketing site (30 pages, mostly static with some ISR) came in at 28 seconds. The e-commerce storefront (Next.js App Router, server components, about 200 product pages using ISR) averaged 52 seconds. The documentation site built with Nextra was the fastest Next.js project at 19 seconds.

Astro projects were quick. The blog with 150 posts built in 14 seconds. The portfolio with heavy image optimization took 22 seconds. SvelteKit projects averaged 18 and 24 seconds respectively. The Remix app was 21 seconds. Nuxt came in at 31 seconds. The static HTML site? Seven seconds, which honestly made me laugh because Vercel is probably overkill for that.

For comparison, the same Next.js SaaS dashboard took 68 seconds on Netlify and 73 seconds on Cloudflare Pages. The Astro blog was 16 seconds on Netlify (close) and 19 seconds on Cloudflare Pages. Build times across the board were either tied or 15-30% faster on Vercel, which I attribute to their build infrastructure being more optimized, particularly the caching between builds.

One thing I noticed: build caching made an enormous difference on subsequent deploys. A cold build of the e-commerce site was 52 seconds, but a warm build where only a few pages changed was 11 seconds. Vercel's Remote Caching for Turborepo projects was similarly impressive -- my monorepo project went from 45-second builds to 8-second builds once the cache was warm.

Edge Latency Testing

I ran latency tests from five locations: Mumbai, London, New York, Sydney, and Sao Paulo. For each location, I measured Time to First Byte (TTFB) on a static page, an ISR page, and a server-rendered page. I used a VPS in each region running curl with timing enabled, hitting each URL 100 times and taking the median.

Static pages were lightning fast everywhere. Mumbai got 23ms TTFB, London 11ms, New York 8ms, Sydney 31ms, Sao Paulo 19ms. These numbers are about as good as physically possible given the speed of light and the location of edge nodes. ISR pages on first request after revalidation added about 80-150ms depending on where the origin function ran, but subsequent requests from cache were identical to static. Server-rendered pages were the most variable: New York averaged 45ms (function ran in iad1), London was 62ms, but Sydney jumped to 210ms because the serverless function was running in a US region and the response had to travel across the Pacific.

This is worth highlighting because it tripped me up initially. Vercel's edge functions are fast everywhere because they run at the edge. But regular serverless functions run in specific regions, and if you do not configure the region to match your audience, you get the fast CDN layer but slow function execution. Once I moved the Australian-facing functions to the Sydney region, TTFB dropped from 210ms to 38ms. This is not a bug -- it is just something you need to know and configure.

The Preview Deployment Workflow

I have saved the feature I consider most valuable for its own section because it genuinely changed how my team works. Every time anyone pushes to a non-production branch or opens a pull request, Vercel creates a complete deployment with its own unique URL. It also posts a comment on the pull request with a link to that deployment.

This sounds simple on paper. In practice, it collapsed what used to be a three-step process (developer runs local build, shares screenshots, PM tests on staging) into one step: PM clicks the preview link and sees the actual changes running in a production-like environment. During the six months of testing, our design team started leaving comments directly on preview deployments using Vercel's commenting feature, which is essentially like Figma comments but on live web pages. The feedback loop went from days to hours.

Every deployment is immutable and kept permanently (on paid plans). This means you can compare any two deployments, roll back to any previous version instantly, and audit exactly what was live at any point in time. I tested the rollback by intentionally shipping a broken build -- rollback to the previous deployment took about 4 seconds and required one click. No rebuild, no waiting. It just swapped which deployment the domain pointed to.

Framework Support: The Next.js Question

Let me address the elephant directly. Yes, Vercel makes Next.js. Yes, Next.js works better on Vercel than anywhere else. Yes, this creates a tension that makes some developers uncomfortable.

Here are the facts from my testing. Next.js features like Incremental Static Regeneration, Server Components, the App Router, Edge Middleware, and Image Optimization all work flawlessly on Vercel with zero configuration. The same Next.js app deployed to Netlify required additional configuration for ISR (and the behavior was slightly different -- stale-while-revalidate timing was less predictable). On Cloudflare Pages, some Next.js features either did not work or required the OpenNext adapter, which adds complexity.

For non-Next.js frameworks, the gap narrows significantly. My Astro, SvelteKit, and Remix projects worked identically on Vercel and Netlify. The zero-config detection was accurate for all frameworks -- I never had to manually specify a build command or output directory. Vercel correctly identified each framework and applied the right settings automatically.

My honest take: if you use Next.js, Vercel is the obvious choice and the experience is noticeably better than alternatives. If you use other frameworks, Vercel is still excellent but the advantage over Netlify or Cloudflare Pages is smaller and comes down to build speed, the preview workflow, and the dashboard experience rather than framework-specific features.

Serverless and Edge Functions: Real-World Numbers

I tested both compute models extensively because the difference between them matters more than most reviews acknowledge.

Serverless Functions on Vercel run Node.js (up to 18.x at the time of testing). Cold starts -- the bane of serverless -- averaged 320ms for a function with moderate dependencies (about 15 npm packages). Warm invocations were 4-12ms. On the Pro plan, I could configure up to 3GB of memory and 300 seconds of timeout, which was enough for every use case I tested including PDF generation and large database queries.

Edge Functions were a different beast entirely. Cold starts were consistently under 2ms -- so fast they are barely distinguishable from warm starts. The tradeoff is that Edge Functions run a stripped-down V8 runtime, not full Node.js. You get Web APIs and a subset of Node APIs. Most npm packages that rely on native bindings or Node-specific APIs will not work. For my use cases -- auth checks, A/B testing, geolocation-based routing, header manipulation -- Edge Functions were perfect. For anything involving database ORMs, file system access, or heavy computation, serverless functions were necessary.

I ran into one specific gotcha: a serverless function that called an external API timed out on the Hobby plan (10-second timeout limit) because the external API was slow. The same function worked fine on Pro (300-second limit). This is not a Vercel bug, but the Hobby plan timeout is something to be aware of if your functions depend on external services.

Analytics and Monitoring

Vercel Analytics comes in two flavors: Web Analytics (page views, visitors, referrers) and Speed Insights (Core Web Vitals from real users). Both are included with Pro plans.

Web Analytics is intentionally minimal. No cookies, no tracking scripts, no GDPR consent needed. It gives you page views, unique visitors, top pages, referrers, countries, and devices. For the marketing site I deployed, this was enough to understand traffic patterns without needing Google Analytics. The numbers were consistently 8-12% lower than Google Analytics on a site where I had both running, which I attribute to GA counting more bot traffic.

Speed Insights is where the real value is. It measures actual Core Web Vitals from real user sessions -- not synthetic tests, but what people actually experience. It showed me that my e-commerce site had a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.1 seconds on mobile in India but only 0.9 seconds on desktop in the US. That granularity helped me identify that a third-party script was the bottleneck on mobile, something a synthetic Lighthouse test would not have caught because it runs on a fast connection.

Function logs are available in real-time through the dashboard. I could tail logs from serverless functions, see request/response details, and filter by status code. It is not Datadog, but for debugging a function that is returning 500 errors, it is good enough that I did not need an external tool for most issues.

Data Storage: KV, Postgres, Blob

Vercel now offers three storage products, all backed by third-party providers (Upstash for KV, Neon for Postgres, Cloudflare R2 for Blob). I tested all three.

Vercel KV worked well for session storage and rate limiting. Reads from edge functions were consistently under 5ms. Writes were 8-15ms. The free tier gives you 256MB of storage and 30,000 daily commands, which covered my needs for the SaaS dashboard's session management. The integration is nice -- you create the store in the dashboard, add the environment variables, and use the @vercel/kv package. Less than 10 minutes from zero to working.

Vercel Postgres was more interesting. It is a serverless Postgres database powered by Neon, which means connection pooling is handled automatically and the database scales to zero when idle. For the e-commerce project, I stored product data and orders in it. Query performance was good for reads (5-20ms from a serverless function in the same region) but writes were slower (30-60ms) compared to a dedicated Postgres instance. The free tier gives you 256MB storage and 60 compute hours per month. For a side project or early-stage startup, this is workable. For anything with serious write throughput, you probably want a dedicated database.

Vercel Blob is straightforward object storage. Upload a file, get a URL. It is backed by Cloudflare R2, so the global distribution is excellent. I used it for user-uploaded images on the SaaS dashboard. Upload speeds were about 200ms for a 1MB image from a US serverless function. Files are served from the edge, so download speeds were fast globally.

Pricing: The Part Everyone Argues About

Vercel pricing is straightforward at the tier level but gets complicated in the details. Here is what I actually paid across six months.

Hobby plan (free): I ran 6 of the 14 projects on the free tier. 100GB bandwidth per month, serverless functions included, preview deployments included. For personal projects and small sites, this was genuinely sufficient. I never hit the bandwidth limit even with a blog getting about 15,000 monthly visitors.

Pro plan ($20/user/month): I ran 8 projects on Pro for the team features, higher limits, and analytics. With 3 team members, that was $60/month base. Over six months, my total Vercel bill was $487, which breaks down to about $81/month. The overage came from bandwidth on the e-commerce site during a traffic spike (an extra $22 in one month) and function execution overage ($15 across the period). Total cost for hosting 8 production applications including a moderately trafficked e-commerce site was under $100/month. For comparison, the equivalent setup on AWS (CloudFront, Lambda, S3, RDS) would have required significantly more configuration time and probably cost about the same or more once you factor in the engineering hours.

Where it gets expensive: The per-seat pricing is the pain point. A team of 10 developers on Pro pays $200/month before any usage charges. A team of 25 pays $500/month. For large teams, the Enterprise plan with custom pricing may actually be cheaper per-seat, but you need to negotiate. Bandwidth overages at $40 per 100GB can also add up fast if you are serving large files or high-traffic media. I would recommend monitoring your bandwidth usage closely in the first month and setting up spend alerts.

Vercel vs. Netlify vs. Cloudflare Pages

Since I deployed projects to all three, I can give a direct comparison based on real experience rather than spec sheets.

Build speed: Vercel won consistently, 15-30% faster than Netlify and 20-35% faster than Cloudflare Pages. The caching between builds on Vercel was also more aggressive and effective.

Preview deployments: All three offer them. Vercel's PR comments and built-in page commenting make the workflow noticeably smoother. Netlify's Deploy Previews are solid. Cloudflare Pages previews work but feel less integrated.

Next.js support: Vercel is the clear winner and it is not close. Netlify works but requires their Next.js runtime and some features behave differently. Cloudflare Pages requires the OpenNext adapter and some features simply are not supported yet.

Non-Next.js frameworks: Near parity across all three. I would call it a tie for Astro, SvelteKit, and Remix deployments.

Pricing: Cloudflare Pages is the cheapest, especially for high-bandwidth sites (unlimited bandwidth on the free tier). Netlify's free tier has more generous bandwidth than Vercel (100GB vs 100GB -- actually the same now). But Netlify does not charge per-seat on Pro, which makes it cheaper for larger teams. Vercel's per-seat model hurts at scale.

Edge computing: Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge Functions are both excellent. Netlify Edge Functions are fine but felt slightly less mature in my testing.

What I Would Change

No review is complete without complaints, and I have a few.

First, the per-seat pricing needs rethinking. Charging per developer seat for a deployment platform feels wrong when the actual costs scale with usage (bandwidth, functions, builds), not with the number of people pushing code. Netlify got this right by not gating collaboration behind per-seat fees on their Pro plan.

Second, the Hobby plan's restrictions on commercial use feel unnecessarily strict. The terms say the free plan is for "personal, non-commercial" projects only. I understand why -- they want teams to pay for Pro -- but it means a freelancer with a small client site technically violates the terms on the free plan. A "Starter" tier at $5-10/month for solo commercial users would fill this gap.

Third, the integrated storage products are convenient but priced at a premium compared to going directly to the underlying providers. Vercel Postgres powered by Neon costs more on Vercel than going to Neon directly. You pay for the integration convenience, which is fair, but the markup is steeper than I expected.

Fourth, function logs disappear after an hour on Pro (and are real-time only on Hobby). For debugging production issues that happened overnight, this is frustrating. I ended up piping logs to an external service for the SaaS dashboard, which added complexity that should not have been necessary.

Final Assessment: Data-Driven Recommendation