Dockfly vs Vercel: when to choose what

We get asked all the time: how does Dockfly compare to Vercel? It's a fair question — both deploy code from Git. But the products are aimed at different problems.

Vercel is the best in the world at deploying frontend web apps, especially Next.js. The CDN is fantastic, the developer experience is polished, and the integration with the Next.js framework is unmatched. If your app is a static site or a Next.js project that fits inside their model, Vercel is hard to beat.

Dockfly is broader. We deploy any container, with any language, alongside managed databases and background workers in the same project. We expose Prometheus metrics, give you SSE log streams, and run on real Linux containers — useful when you have a service that doesn't fit the serverless box.

When to pick Vercel: marketing sites, Next.js apps, projects where the frontend is the whole product.

When to pick Dockfly: full-stack apps with workers and databases, services in Go/Python/Ruby/Java, products that need long-running compute, or anyone who wants to keep their bill low and their architecture flexible.

There's no single right answer. Use the one that disappears into the background of your work.