Cloudflare Pages vs Vercel
Pricing
Cloudflare Pages: Free tier (500 builds/mo, unlimited bandwidth), Pro from $20/mo
Vercel: Free tier, Pro from $20/mo
Description
Cloudflare Pages: Fast, secure hosting for static sites and Jamstack apps with unlimited bandwidth
Vercel: Frontend cloud platform for deploying web applications with zero configuration
Pros
- Unlimited bandwidth on free tier: no surprise bills if you hit the front page of Hacker News
- Global CDN with 300+ edge locations means fast load times everywhere
- Built-in DDoS protection and SSL at no extra cost
- Push to git and your site is live in under a minute, zero config
- Free tier covers hobby projects and early-stage startups with generous limits
- Preview deployments for every pull request so you catch issues before production
Cons
- Cloudflare now recommends Workers, not Pages, for new projects
- Build times are slower than Vercel and Netlify
- Smaller ecosystem: fewer one-click integrations and community templates
- Workers/Functions development experience is less polished than Vercel's
- Costs escalate fast once you hit scale: bandwidth and serverless function charges add up
- Some features (middleware, edge functions) lock you into the Vercel ecosystem
- If Vercel goes down, your site goes down. No easy migration path for Next.js-specific features
Details
Cloudflare Pages is the “set it and forget it” hosting option. Unlimited bandwidth on the free tier means you never worry about traffic spikes: if your blog post goes viral, you do not get a surprise bill. The free plan includes 500 builds a month, and Cloudflare’s Pro plan ($20/mo billed annually, $25 monthly) raises that to 5,000. The site you are reading right now runs on Cloudflare Pages.
Cloudflare’s documentation now says “Start new projects with Workers”, describing Workers as its primary platform for building applications and noting that it supports most Pages use cases with a broader feature set. Pages is still offered, and Cloudflare publishes a guide for moving a Pages project to Workers. The tradeoff is developer experience: Vercel and Netlify have smoother workflows, faster builds, and more integrations. But if your priority is reliable, fast, cheap hosting that does not punish you for success, it is hard to beat free-with-unlimited-bandwidth.
Vercel removes the gap between “code works on my machine” and “code works in production.” Push to GitHub, and your site is deployed. Every pull request gets its own preview URL. You never think about servers, CDN config, or SSL certificates.
Built for Next.js (they make it), but works with Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt, and plain static sites too. The free tier is genuinely generous, enough for most side projects and early startups. The risk is cost at scale: once you start hitting real traffic, the jump from free to $20/month to hundreds of dollars can be abrupt. Plan your exit strategy before you build too deep.
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