Amazon CloudFront vs Vercel Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $200/mo
• Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)

Why choose Vercel

• Higher Ease of Use score (9/10 vs 5/10)

A

Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

Vercel

Pros

• Every pull request automatically gets its own preview URL, which reviewers rate as the most polished preview workflow available.
• New Next.js features work on Vercel from launch day, because Vercel maintains the framework.
• Automatic DDoS mitigation and a basic firewall are included on every plan, including the free one.
• The compliance list is strong: ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, TISAX Level 2, and HIPAA on Enterprise.
• Pro includes unlimited viewer seats, so non-developers can review work without paying for a seat.

Cons

• There is no hard spending cap, only alerts, so traffic spikes or bot crawls can produce large overage bills.
• Each developer costs $20 per month on Pro, which makes larger teams expensive.
• Next.js features such as ISR, image optimization and middleware create lock-in that makes migrating away costly.
• It is not a full backend: databases come from marketplace partners rather than Vercel itself.
• The jump from Pro to Enterprise is steep, and user reports complain of slow support on billing issues.