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Render vs Vercel

Render and Vercel are both cloud platforms that let you deploy and scale web applications. Our platforms excel at different things. Depending on your needs, Render can be a good alternative to Vercel, or you may want to use Render and Vercel together.

This guide compares Render and Vercel to help you make the best choice for your project.

Summary

When to choose Render

  • Full-stack and backend-heavy applications: Render enables you to build and scale applications with complex backend requirements, including multiservice architectures, cron jobs, and background tasks and workers.

  • Diverse tech stacks: If your application involves multiple programming languages and frameworks beyond JavaScript and Next.js, Render provides the flexibility you need. Render lets you natively deploy any app with Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust and Elixir. You can deploy apps in any other language by packaging it up as a Docker image.

  • Stateful applications: Render’s serverful model supports stateful apps with persistent disks and first-party managed datastores (Render Postgres and Key Value).

  • Long-running tasks: Render web services enable HTTP responses to take up to 100 minutes. Render’s cron jobs can run up to 12 hours, and you can deploy background workers to handle requests on an ongoing, continuous basis.

When to choose Vercel

Vercel excels in the following areas:

  • Next.js integrations: Vercel shines for frontend-centric applications, particularly those built with Next.js. For example, Vercel automatically optimizes images that use the next/image component and serves them from the Vercel Edge Network. Note that you can still set up image optimization for Next.js on Render by integrating a custom image loader.

  • Serverless functions: For projects requiring serverless architecture, Vercel offers serverless Vercel Functions. Serverless functions can be more cost-effective than full servers for workloads with occasional bursty traffic.

  • Frontend optimization: Vercel has many built-in features to optimize frontend performance; for instance, Next.js Middleware automatically runs on Vercel’s Edge Network (and notably, Middleware currently can’t be configured to run on a regular Node.js runtime).

Depending on your needs, Render may be a strong alternative for your Next.js apps. Many developers deploy Next.js apps on Render, and even save money compared to hosting on Vercel. (See the “Pricing” section below.)

Render offers many equivalent features to Vercel, including a global CDN, automatic DDoS protection, fully managed TLS certificates, and easy deployment from Git repository hosts like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Render, like Vercel, offers excellent developer experience with an emphasis on clean, intuitive design across our interfaces and CLI.

You can deploy Next.js apps on Render as either a static site or a full stack web service.

Using both

Render and Vercel are highly complementary. Many developers choose to host their backend services and databases on Render, and their frontend on Vercel to take advantage of their Next.js-specific optimizations.

Where Render shines

Full-stack and backend-heavy architectures

  • Render provides end-to-end support for full-stack applications, including static sites, backend web services, and managed databases. This enables you to host all parts of a web app on Render, instead of across multiple vendors. Vercel is primarily designed for frontend applications but supports serverless functions (Vercel Functions) for light backend tasks. Vercel Functions have limited memory and CPU, and you need to integrate additional vendors for components like databases.

  • Render’s persistent disks allow you to store data across deploys, enabling stateful web services as well as the ability to self-host any stateful service, including MySQL, Elasticsearch, and Wordpress. Vercel focuses on stateless, serverless architectures, which are ideal for scalable frontend applications but less suited for stateful backend services.

  • Render offers managed Postgres and a managed Redis equivalent directly on the Render platform. You can configure your Render backend services to talk to these datastores over a private network, which improves security and reduces latency between your services. On Vercel, Redis and Postgres are available only through Marketplace vendors. You can only connect to those vendors over a private network if you’re on Vercel’s enterprise plan.

  • Render offers background workers, which let you run background tasks continuously, including very long running tasks. Combined with Render’s managed Redis equivalent, you can easily set up task queues like Celery. On Vercel, serverless function execution times are limited. (See the “Long-running requests” section below for details.)

  • Render’s web services support Websockets, which are essential for modern realtime applications, such as online chat and games. Vercel does not support Websockets due to its serverless architecture. To use realtime communication in a Vercel app, you must integrate with a third-party provider.

  • Render’s serverful web services allow you to respond quickly to every request. You can configure your web services to autoscale based on CPU and memory usage limits, which enables your services to handle traffic spikes. Due to the nature of serverless architectures, your Vercel functions will hit cold starts, which can cause occasional long load times for end users of your web app.

    • Note: Render’s free tier web services do spin down with inactivity. Our paid services are always on.

Language and runtime support

  • Render lets you deploy services using Docker. Render can build your Docker image for you from a Dockerfile in your Git repository. You can also deploy prebuilt images directly from widely-used public or private container registries, including Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, and AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Vercel does not support Docker.

  • Render offers native runtime support for Rust and Elixir, which are not supported on Vercel. Render also natively supports Node.js, Python, Go, and Ruby.

Long-running requests and jobs

  • Render web services allow HTTP responses to take up to 100 minutes. This longer request limit lets you easily handle longer-running calls to third-party APIs, including financial services APIs and LLMs. Vercel’s serverless functions support much more limited request lengths: see the table below.

    Vercel PlanRequest Timeout Limit
    HobbyUp to 1 minute
    ProUp to 5 minutes
    EnterpriseUp to 15 minutes

  • Render cron jobs can run up to 12 hours. Vercel’s cron jobs must complete within the timeout limits shown above.

  • You can create any number of cron jobs on Render, on any of our tiers, and they will execute in a timely manner. Vercel limits the number of cron jobs you can create. For example, on Vercel’s Hobby tier, you can only create 2 cron jobs, and these jobs can only be triggered once a day. (Cron jobs that are disabled, but not deleted, still count toward this limit.) On the Hobby tier, Vercel also does not guarantee timely executions of your cron jobs.

  • If you need to support continuous background job processing, Render offers background workers. Vercel does not support this type of workload.

Security

  • Render offers private services and private networking on all Render plans—with no additional setup required from you. This means you can easily create secure connections between all of your backend services on Render, including databases and web services, and keep traffic between these services off the open internet. Vercel only offers private networking on its enterprise plan. Unless you’re on Vercel’s enterprise plan, your Vercel backends must allow traffic from all IPs on the open internet.

  • On Render, cron jobs are inaccessible via the public internet. On Vercel, cron jobs are triggered by a request over the open internet. At best, you can configure a password on Vercel that’s required to trigger your cron job.

CI / CD

  • Render allows builds to take up to 120 minutes. Vercel imposes a 45-minute limit on build times. When that limit is reached, the deployment will fail.

  • While both Render and Vercel let you create deployment previews, Render also lets you create full-stack preview environments that can contain multiple services, as well as databases with custom test data.

  • Render lets you configure a predeploy command: a task that runs after your new build completes, but before it’s deployed. This lets you conveniently trigger key deployment tasks such as running database migrations.

Pricing

  • Render’s serverful model can offer more predictable pricing than Vercel’s. In some cases, customers save money by hosting their Next.js apps on Render. For example, Showzone migrated a large Next.js app to Render from Vercel, and reduced their hosting costs from over $800 to $40.

    In general, the most cost-effective solution for you depends on your workload. Render’s serverful model tends to be more cost effective for long-running workloads and apps with a steady flow of traffic. Vercel’s serverless model tends to be more cost effective for shorter tasks and intermittent workloads.

Product roadmap

  • Render’s product roadmap is public, and we’ve maintained it consistently for years. You can submit feature requests and get notified as soon as we start working on them.

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