Cloudflare Workers vs Vercel
Pricing
Cloudflare Workers: Free tier (100,000 requests/day), paid from $5/mo
Vercel: Free tier, Pro from $20/mo
Description
Cloudflare Workers: Serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust code and full-stack apps on Cloudflare's global network
Vercel: Frontend cloud platform for deploying web applications with zero configuration
Pros
- The free plan includes 100,000 requests a day, and requests to static assets are free and unlimited
- The paid plan starts at $5/month with 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds included
- No cold starts, and you pay for CPU time, not for time spent waiting on network calls
- 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
- Only a subset of Node.js APIs is supported, so some npm packages won't run
- The free plan allows 10 ms of CPU time per request
- 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
Workers runs your code in Cloudflare’s data centres in more than 330 cities, close to your users. It handles APIs, full-stack apps built with React, Vue or Next.js, scheduled jobs and webhooks, and it connects to Cloudflare’s databases, storage and queues through bindings.
Cloudflare’s documentation for Pages now says to start new projects on Workers, and calls Workers its primary platform for building applications.
The paid plan is $5 a month plus any usage beyond the included amounts, and requests for static files are never charged. Check that your dependencies run on the Workers runtime before you commit, since it is not a full Node.js environment.
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.
Cloudflare Workers verified
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