Cloudflare Pages vs Vercel vs Netlify: Where Should You Host Your Website?

The hosting landscape for modern websites has changed dramatically. If you’re building with frameworks like Astro, Next.js, SvelteKit, or any static site generator, you have three dominant platforms to choose from: Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, and Netlify.

All three are excellent. All three have generous free tiers. And all three will serve your website faster than traditional shared hosting ever could. But they have meaningful differences that affect your costs, performance, and development experience.

I’ve deployed production sites on all three platforms. Here’s what I’ve learned.

The Quick Overview

Before diving into details, here’s the high-level picture.

Cloudflare Pages — The most generous free tier, best global performance, and most cost-effective at scale. Slightly less polished developer experience.

Vercel — The best developer experience, especially for Next.js. Excellent performance. Gets expensive at scale with some pricing gotchas.

Netlify — The pioneer in this space. Good all-rounder with a mature feature set. Pricing can spike unexpectedly under certain traffic patterns.

Free Tier Comparison

For small business websites and personal projects, the free tier often covers everything you need.

Cloudflare Pages (Free Plan)

• Unlimited bandwidth (this is not a typo)
• Unlimited requests
• 500 builds per month
• 1 build at a time
• Support for Workers (serverless functions)

Cloudflare’s free tier is the most generous by a significant margin. Unlimited bandwidth means you’ll never get a surprise bill because a blog post went viral or a bot crawled your site aggressively.

Vercel (Hobby Plan)

• 100 GB bandwidth per month
• Serverless function execution included
• 6,000 build minutes per month
• Excellent preview deployments
• Commercial use not permitted on the free tier

That last point is important. Vercel’s Hobby plan explicitly prohibits commercial use. If you’re building a site for a business (including your own), you technically need the Pro plan at twenty pounds per user per month.

Netlify (Starter Plan)

• 100 GB bandwidth per month
• 300 build minutes per month
• 125,000 serverless function invocations per month
• 100 form submissions per month
• 1,000 identity (auth) users

Netlify’s free tier is solid for small projects, though the build minutes are more limited than the other two.

Performance: Where Your Site Loads From

All three platforms use content delivery networks (CDNs) to serve your site from locations close to your visitors. But the networks differ.

Cloudflare’s Edge Network

Cloudflare operates one of the largest networks in the world, with data centres in over 300 cities across 100+ countries. Your site is served from whichever location is closest to the visitor. For a UK-based business with UK customers, this means your site is served from London, Manchester, or other UK locations.

Cloudflare’s network was originally built for their CDN and DDoS protection services, so it’s battle-tested at enormous scale. Performance is consistently excellent regardless of where your visitors are.

Vercel’s Edge Network

Vercel uses a combination of AWS infrastructure and their own edge network. Performance is excellent, particularly for Next.js applications where Vercel has done significant optimisation work. They have edge locations globally, with good coverage in Europe and North America.

For Next.js specifically, Vercel’s performance optimisations — like Incremental Static Regeneration and edge middleware — are best-in-class. No other platform runs Next.js as well as Vercel, which makes sense given Vercel created Next.js.

Netlify’s Edge Network

Netlify uses a multi-CDN approach and has built their own edge infrastructure. Performance is good and has improved significantly over the years. They offer edge functions powered by Deno, which provide server-side logic at CDN locations.

In my testing, Netlify’s Time to First Byte (TTFB) is slightly higher than Cloudflare’s on average, though the difference is small enough that most users wouldn’t notice.

Pricing at Scale

The free tier gets you started, but what happens when your site grows?

Cloudflare Pages (Paid Plans)

Cloudflare’s Pro plan starts at twenty dollars per month for the broader Cloudflare suite, but Pages-specific pricing remains incredibly generous even at scale. Bandwidth is unlimited on all plans. You primarily pay for additional build capacity and Workers usage.

For a high-traffic static or SSR site, Cloudflare is almost always the cheapest option. Their pricing model doesn’t penalise you for success.

Vercel (Pro Plan and Beyond)

Vercel Pro costs twenty dollars per user per month. This includes 1 TB of bandwidth, 24,000 build minutes, and more serverless function capacity. Going beyond included limits costs extra — bandwidth overages are forty dollars per 100 GB, and serverless function execution is metered.

Where Vercel gets expensive is with serverless functions and edge middleware. If your application makes heavy use of server-side logic (API routes, server-side rendering, middleware), costs can climb quickly. I’ve seen projects where Vercel bills jumped unexpectedly due to serverless function usage that the team didn’t anticipate.

Netlify (Pro Plan and Beyond)

Netlify Pro costs nineteen dollars per user per month, with 1 TB of bandwidth and 25,000 build minutes. Like Vercel, overages cost extra. Bandwidth overages are fifty-five dollars per 100 GB.

Netlify has faced criticism for surprise bills related to bandwidth overages and DDoS attacks. To their credit, they’ve improved their policies around this, but it’s worth understanding the pricing model before committing.

Framework Support

Cloudflare Pages

Supports virtually any static site generator or SSR framework. Their Workers runtime supports Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Remix, and others. Next.js support exists through their OpenNext adapter, though it’s not as seamless as running Next.js on Vercel.

Vercel

Supports all major frameworks but is optimised for Next.js. If you’re using Next.js, Vercel is the gold standard. For other frameworks, Vercel works fine but you don’t get the same level of optimisation.

Netlify

Good support across frameworks with their own adapters. They’ve invested in Astro and SvelteKit support. The experience is solid across the board without being the absolute best for any single framework.

Developer Experience

Build and Deploy

All three platforms support Git-based deployments — push to your repository, and the site builds and deploys automatically. They all provide preview deployments for pull requests.

Vercel’s developer experience is the most polished. Their dashboard is clean, build logs are clear, and their CLI is excellent. Setting up a new project is often a one-click process.

Cloudflare’s dashboard has improved significantly but still feels more utilitarian. The CLI (Wrangler) is powerful but has a steeper learning curve.

Netlify falls between the two. Their dashboard is good, their CLI is mature, and their documentation is comprehensive.

Serverless Functions

Vercel uses AWS Lambda under the hood and supports Node.js, Go, Python, and Ruby. Their API routes in Next.js are the smoothest serverless experience available.

Cloudflare Workers use a different runtime (V8 isolates, not Node.js). This means incredible cold start times (essentially zero) but also means some Node.js APIs aren’t available. If your serverless functions rely heavily on Node.js-specific features, you’ll need to adapt them for Workers.

Netlify Functions use AWS Lambda and support Node.js and Go. They also offer Edge Functions powered by Deno for lower-latency serverless logic.

My Recommendations

For Most Small Business Websites: Cloudflare Pages

If you’re building a brochure site, a blog, or a small e-commerce frontend, Cloudflare Pages is hard to beat. The unlimited bandwidth removes any anxiety about traffic spikes, the performance is excellent globally, and the costs stay low as you grow.

For Next.js Applications: Vercel

If your project uses Next.js, Vercel is the natural home for it. The performance optimisations and developer experience are meaningfully better than running Next.js anywhere else. Just keep an eye on serverless function usage to avoid surprise costs.

For Teams That Want a Mature All-in-One Platform: Netlify

Netlify’s built-in forms, identity management, and mature plugin ecosystem make it a good choice for teams that want to avoid integrating multiple services. If you need authentication, form handling, and CMS features alongside hosting, Netlify bundles them conveniently.

For Cost-Sensitive Projects at Scale: Cloudflare Pages

Once traffic grows beyond the free tier, Cloudflare’s pricing model is the most predictable and affordable. If keeping hosting costs low is a priority, Cloudflare wins decisively.

What I Use for My Own Projects

For my own projects and most client work, I primarily use Cloudflare Pages. The unlimited bandwidth, excellent global performance, and low costs align perfectly with the kind of sites I build — fast, modern frontends that serve UK audiences.

For projects where I’m using Next.js with Payload CMS (which runs inside Next.js), I deploy to Vercel. The integration is seamless and the performance optimisations justify the cost.

Making Your Decision

The good news is that all three platforms are excellent and any of them will serve a modern website well. The differences matter most at scale or when specific features are important to your project.

If you’re not sure which platform is right for your project, reach out. I can recommend the best hosting approach based on your specific requirements, expected traffic, and budget.