Recently, on behalf of one of our clients, we explored various options for hosting NextJS. NextJS is an advanced FrontEnd framework that leverages the latest Edge hosting technology. For our client, it was important to fully utilize all the possibilities of NextJS in the hosting solution, including Server Site Rendering, Incremental Static Generation, and the ability to use Middleware.
As the developer of NextJS, Vercel is the automatic hosting provider for NextJS users. With a lot of developer happiness and support for all (sometimes exotic) NextJS functionality, they are far ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, they fall short in terms of support and their prices can be steep if you scale up from startup to a large user, creating a classic locked-in situation.
This blog contains a brief summary of our research. If you want to know more about our research, please contact us. Comments can be found at the bottom of this article.
The Candidates
We began our research with 6 candidates, of which 3 were open-source solutions in the form of Infrastructure as Code modules. Links to these projects are provided below.
| Framework | Supported | Link |
|---|---|---|
| slab nextjs | one developer | https://github.com/sladg/nextjs-lambda |
| cdk-nextjs | JetBridge | https://github.com/jetbridge/cdk-nextjs |
| Terraform AWS NextJS | developer now works at Vercel | https://github.com/milliHQ/terraform-aws-next-js |
Unfortunately, none of the above projects supported all NextJS functionalities. A striking detail, during our research, the main developer of the above promising Terraform for NextJS solution, left his project and started working for Vercel.
Another interesting detail was that AWS Amplify was initially dismissed as a serious alternative to Vercel. Their support for NextJS was very limited. During our research, AWS released a new Amplify version that seemed specifically tailored for NextJS. AWS Amplify was back in the race.
Comparison
For this comparison we have the three left competitors Vercel, AWS Amplify and NextJS on containers. The latter is a custom build setup running NextJS e.g. on AWS ECS.
Scalability
With kind engineering care and a Well Architected Framework design NextJS on containers has a good scalability. There are no theoratical limits.
Vercel and Amplify as both serverless products scale seamlessly. Vercel has it’s plan limits which will be throttled when reached.
AWS Amplify should scale endlessly.
| Solution | Scalability |
|---|---|
| NextJS on containers | architecture dependant |
| Vercel | limited by plan |
| Amplify | unlimited |
Well supported
Many sites run NextJS on containers. This solution does not differ a lot from any other NodeJS application running on a container cluster. Running NodeJS on containers is an industry standard. TechNative has a lot experience with this containers configuration and we have many competitors offering support too. Community support is healty and sufficient.
Vercel offers state of the art functional support for NextJS. Every NextJS feature works on Vercel. Customer support is poor.
Amplify just got its product ready for NextJS 13. Earlier Amplify versions had a lot of problems with NextJS and Amplify NextJS was known to be unstable and buggy. We currently don’t really know how well Amplify supports NextJS 13 and future versions. We know AWS has the ambition to compete with Vercel. And we know AWS Customer support is outstanding. When having technical problems we always get support from experienced support engineers.
| Solution | Current Features Supp. | Future feature Supp. | Customer Supp. |
|---|---|---|---|
| NextJS containers | very good | very good | supplier dependant |
| Vercel | very good | very good | poor |
| Amplify | good | good ambitions | excellent |
Easy to understand for DevOps and Developer
When it comes to maintainabily and the usage of a solution cannot not be too complex.
NextJS on Containers has a good amount of effort spent in making the pipelines user friendly.
Vercel delivers the most intuitive administration panels out of the box.
Amplify’s control panel has a lot of options and configuration possibilies. It’s design is not very intuitive but any developer should be able to work with Amplify after a little practice.
| Solution | Maintainability by DevOps | Usage by FrontEnd Developer |
|---|---|---|
| NextJS containers | normal | dependant on architecture |
| Vercel | easy | easy |
| Amplify | normal | normal |
Support for NextJS' edge and custom requirements
NextJS on Containers is a solution that can be adapted to almost any technical or network requirement. Every requirement need investment but everything is possible.
Vercel supports all NextJS functionality, but external requirements are not automatically supported. Being a blackbox solution can be a problem in future.
NextJS 13 and other some other custom requirements seem to be supported by the current Amplify platform version. Being able to run custom images gives some extra control at build phase. At runtime. Amplify is a blackbox solution.
| Solution | Full stack compatibility | FrontEnd compatibility |
|---|---|---|
| NextJS containers | complete | complete |
| Vercel | Missing VPN compatibility | complete |
| Amplify | Missing VPN compatibility | normal |
Conclusion
The way this research project drifted illustrates how fast this field in the cloud industry is changing and evolving. NextJS is a moving target which makes it challenging to formulate a long during strategy for hosting NextJS.
Many users are not happy with Vercel’s poor support and their pricing model. This makes it reasonable to look at alternatives.
Unfortunately there currently is no serverless open source option to choose from. Technically this is the successor of running NextJS on containers. I predict a stable well supported open source serverless solution will be available within a few years.
The new Amplify service is very promising and deserves a deeper look by the developers and stakeholders of companies that rely on NextJS.
Running the website on a container solution in AWS is always a good alternative. This might not be the cheapest solution, but this is currently the most technically transparent and flexible choice available.
