Vercel

Creators of Next.js

Next.js works on Vercel as you'd expected it to work. That's all I would need to say. Every single Next.js feature like Preview, Incremental Static Generation is covered. With no additional config needed.

Vercel feels very much like Apple but in the front-end world. The platform is like Macbook, and Next.js is like OS X. They fit. Maintaining the infrastructure and working on software is a great advantage and gives a next-gen user and developer experience.

Infrastructure

Vercel Global Edge Network is built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In practice, GCP is used only for routing in the Western Europe region, Brussels in Belgium.

Vercel Analytics

Vercel gathers privacy-friendly, real-time traffic insights with the use of in-depth metrics like top pages, top referring sites and demographics; all rendered in a seamless, compact, cross-platform view.

Essential insights are collected directly from your visitors' devices (as opposed to your laptop), producing highly predictable user behaviour data. This is achieved through Audiences, currently in beta across all plans.

With web vitals view, you can easily gather performance insights and real experience scores about your application, without adjusting your scripts or modifying your code. This can immensely improve your conversion rates and over time, your application traffic and revenue.

Vercel Analytics currently supports Next.js, Gatsby, and Nuxt projects. Works out-of-the-box if you use Next.js and Vercel to host the website. It can be enabled if you host your website somewhere else but requires a Vercel Pro plan.

Dashboard

In modern deployment platforms like Vercel, the dashboard and user experience are one of the things that make the difference. In contrast to big cloud providers AWS or GCP, Vercel Dashboard is highly intuitive, easy to manage and navigate. Team, env variables, billing. All you need to set up a front-end project easily is there.

Usage metrics

Usage view is a dashboard of all critical metrics. You can check if your functions fail, what CPU they use and how fast they execute.

Password protection, custom deployment domains

Some features, like password protection, can be quite pricey. If you need this but don't want to pay $150/mo, Vercel might be a bummer.

Vercel Integrations

Vercel Integrations are apps that connect external services with the Vercel project. You can quickly connect PlanetScale, Fauna or Supabase as a database. Use Logaler or Logflare to analyze all your apps in one centralized place.

Vercel also integrates with several popular headless CMS including Contentful, Sanity and DatoCMS. It automatically configures preview and webhooks.

All in one click.

The new marketplace was launched in July 2021. There are currently over 50 integrations to choose from and a few in beta, ranging from Devtools to Monitoring, Databases & Logging of telemetry data. New marketplace and new apps that are coming clearly show Vercel put a new priority on it.

Vercel CLI

The vercel command allows you to quickly deploy projects; straight out of your terminal. Just type it, hit enter, and enjoy a new build on the cloud.

vercel dev replicates the whole Vercel deployment on your machine. You can test serverless functions locally without triggering new deploy or push changes to the repository.

To explore more options, check out the docs.

Conclusion

Vercel is a great Jamstack and serverless platform. It covers everything you need to develop a modern site or app. It's very front-end-friendly. All you need to do is to connect the git repository and start pushing code.