Best Vercel Alternatives for Full-Stack Apps in 2026

Vercel is the best frontend deployment platform. Period. For Next.js, it's unmatched. But most production apps aren't just a frontend. They need long-running services, background workers, cron jobs, managed databases, and WebSockets. Vercel doesn't do any of that. This guide covers 9 alternatives that do.

If you're here, you've probably hit one of these walls: serverless function timeouts killing your API, surprise bills from edge function invocations, or the realization that Vercel sunsetted its own database products and now points you to a marketplace. You need a full-stack platform with persistent services, workers, and managed databases — capabilities Vercel does not offer.

We evaluated each alternative on what matters for full-stack apps: backend support, managed databases, workers and cron, pricing transparency, and whether you can run it on your own cloud.

#TL;DR — Quick picks

Best full-stack BYOC platform: AZIN — deploy to your own GCP with Vercel-level DX. Web services, workers, cron, managed databases.

Best full-stack DX: Railway — visual canvas, one-click databases, transparent usage pricing. Great for startups.

Best free tier: Coolify — open-source, self-hosted. Deploy anything to any server. Free forever.

Best for edge + API: Cloudflare Workers — edge compute with D1 databases and R2 storage. Growing fast but locked to the Cloudflare ecosystem.

Best VM flexibility: Fly.io — full VMs in 18 regions. WebSockets, long-running servers, databases. More ops knowledge required.

#Why Vercel falls short for full-stack

Vercel has a reported $9.3B valuation (per Forbes) built around one thing: deploying frontends. It does that brilliantly. But when your app grows beyond a Next.js frontend, the cracks show fast.

Serverless timeouts

Hobby plan: 10-second timeout. Pro: 60 seconds (120s with Fluid Compute). Enterprise: 300 seconds (800s max with Fluid Compute). As of February 2026, if your backend process takes longer, it dies. No long-running services. No WebSockets. No persistent connections.

No workers or cron jobs

Need a background job that processes uploads? A cron job that syncs data every hour? A queue consumer? Vercel doesn't support any of these. You'll need a separate platform for backend work, which defeats the purpose of a unified deployment platform.

Vercel sunsetted its own databases

In late 2024, Vercel sunsetted Vercel Postgres and Vercel KV. Existing databases were migrated to Neon. New users are pointed to the Vercel Marketplace for third-party integrations like Neon, Upstash, and PlanetScale.

This isn't necessarily bad — Neon is a solid Postgres provider. But it means Vercel no longer manages your database directly. You're integrating services from a marketplace and managing multiple billing relationships.

Multi-dimensional usage billing

Vercel meters usage across multiple dimensions (as of February 2026): edge requests ($2.00/million), bandwidth ($0.15/GB), CPU time ($0.128/hr), function invocations ($0.60/million), ISR reads/writes. Usage-based charges across multiple dimensions can lead to higher bills when traffic increases unexpectedly. Vercel has added spending alerts and caps to help manage costs. Pro plan costs $20/seat/mo — a 10-person team pays $200/mo before any usage.

Some developers have reported unexpected charges when workloads scale beyond included limits. Vercel has added spending alerts and caps, but the underlying model is complex and hard to predict.

No BYOC

Your code runs on Vercel's infrastructure. Enterprise plans offer VPC peering, but your containers still live on Vercel-managed servers. For teams with compliance requirements, data sovereignty needs, or cloud provider credits — that's a dealbreaker.

#What to look for in a Vercel alternative

Not every platform on this list is right for every team. Here's what matters for full-stack apps:

Full-stack service support

Can you deploy web services, API servers, background workers, and cron jobs from the same platform? Or do you need to stitch together three services?

Managed databases

Does the platform offer managed PostgreSQL, Redis, or other databases? Or do you need to bring your own from a third-party provider?

Workers and cron

Can you run persistent background processes? Scheduled tasks? Queue consumers? This is table stakes for production backends.

Predictable pricing

Usage-based pricing sounds fair until you can't predict your bill. Look for platforms with transparent, understandable pricing models — ideally with spending caps or flat-rate options.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)

Does the platform deploy to your cloud account? This matters for compliance, cloud credits, data residency, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Regions and latency

Where are the servers? Can you deploy close to your users? Multi-region support matters for global apps.

#AZIN

Full-stack BYOC. Vercel DX for your entire stack.

AZIN is the best Vercel alternative for full-stack apps that need infrastructure ownership — it deploys web services, workers, cron jobs, and managed PostgreSQL (Cloud SQL) to your own GCP account via GKE Autopilot, with $0 cluster overhead (as of February 2026). AWS and Azure support are on the roadmap.

Unlike Vercel, AZIN runs persistent backends, long-running processes, and managed databases — all on infrastructure you own. No serverless timeouts. No surprise bills from edge function invocations.

Key features

• Git-push deployments to your own cloud
• Web services, workers, cron jobs
• Managed PostgreSQL, Redis, and more
• Automatic HTTPS, custom domains
• Private container networking
• Environment and secret management
• Multi-region deployments

Pricing

Platform fee plus your actual cloud provider costs. No markup on compute. You pay GCP directly for the infrastructure, and AZIN for the platform layer.

Best for

Teams that need production-grade deployments on their own cloud. Startups with cloud provider credits. Companies with compliance or data residency requirements. Anyone who wants Vercel DX without Vercel lock-in.

Limitations

Requires a GCP account. AWS and Azure support are on the roadmap. For a quick weekend prototype where you don't care about infrastructure ownership, Railway or Render have a faster on-ramp.

Head to Head

AZIN vs Vercel — Full Comparison

Full-stack BYOC vs frontend-first serverless. Pricing, scaling, workers, databases, and regions.

#Railway

Visual full-stack PaaS with transparent pricing.

Railway is a developer-first PaaS with a visual canvas that makes it easy to deploy web services, databases, and background workers. It's what Heroku should have become.

One-click databases, environment management, and a real-time usage dashboard. Deploy from Git or Docker, see your infrastructure as a visual graph, and scale individual services independently.

Key features

• Visual project canvas
• One-click PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis
• Web services, workers, cron jobs
• Private networking between services
• Real-time cost tracking
• Deploy from Git or Docker

Pricing

$5/month Hobby, $20/seat Pro. Usage-based billing beyond included credits. Transparent pricing per resource-minute with real-time dashboards. No hidden per-request fees.

Best for

Startups and small teams that want Heroku-level simplicity with modern infrastructure. Great DX, fast iteration cycles, reasonable pricing.

Limitations

No BYOC (Enterprise only, and still limited). Only 4 regions. No autoscaling on Hobby/Pro. At high scale, costs can exceed what you'd pay running the same workloads on your own cloud. Read more in our Railway alternatives comparison or the AZIN vs Railway breakdown.

#Render

Full-stack PaaS with managed databases and background workers.

Render positions itself as the modern Heroku. It supports web services, background workers, cron jobs, and managed PostgreSQL and Redis — all from one platform. SOC 2 Type II compliant.

The pricing model is simpler than Vercel's: pick a service type, pick a size, pay a flat monthly rate. No per-request billing, no surprise overages.

Key features

• Web services with automatic scaling
• Background workers for long-running tasks
• Cron jobs (up to 12-hour execution)
• Managed PostgreSQL and Redis
• Docker and Git deployments
• SOC 2 Type II compliance
• DDoS protection

Pricing

Free tier for static sites. Paid services start at $7/month. Pro plans at $19/seat. Flat monthly pricing per service — no per-request billing.

Best for

Teams that want a straightforward, full-stack PaaS with managed databases. Good middle ground between simplicity and capability. Solid choice for B2B SaaS backends.

Limitations

No BYOC. Limited to 5 regions. Autoscaling is available but can be unpredictable on lower tiers. Shared database instances have lower resource allocations than dedicated instances. See our Render alternatives breakdown or the AZIN vs Render comparison.

#Fly.io

Full VM flexibility with global edge deployment.

Fly.io runs your apps in Firecracker micro-VMs across 18 regions. It's the closest thing to running your own servers without actually managing them. WebSockets, long-running processes, persistent connections — all supported natively.

Unlike serverless platforms, Fly.io gives you real VMs. You get a full Linux environment, which means anything that runs in a Docker container runs on Fly.

Key features

• Firecracker micro-VMs in 18 regions
• WebSocket and long-running process support
• Managed Postgres (via Supabase partnership)
• Fly Volumes for persistent storage
• Scale-to-zero for cost optimization
• Global Anycast networking
• GPU support

Pricing

Usage-based, billed per second. A shared 256MB instance runs about $1.94/month continuously. Managed Postgres starts at $38/month (Basic). Bandwidth at $0.02/GB in NA/EU.

Best for

Teams that need global edge deployment, WebSocket support, or full VM control. AI/ML workloads that need GPU access. Apps that benefit from running close to users in multiple regions.

Limitations

No BYOC. Steeper learning curve than Railway or Render — you'll need to understand fly.toml configs and Fly CLI. Managed Postgres plans start high ($38/month minimum). Region consolidation in 2025-2026 reduced some options. No visual dashboard for infrastructure management.

#Netlify

Frontend-focused. Not a full-stack alternative.

Netlify is Vercel's closest competitor for frontend deployment. Generous free tier, excellent Git integration, edge functions, and a solid CDN. It's included here because it appears in every "Vercel alternatives" list — but let's be clear about what it is and isn't.

Netlify does not offer managed databases, background workers, cron jobs, or long-running services. It's a frontend platform with serverless functions. If you need full-stack, keep scrolling.

Key features

• Static site and SSR deployment
• Edge functions (Deno-based)
• Forms and identity (basic)
• Split testing and deploy previews
• Generous free tier (100GB bandwidth)

Pricing

Free tier included. Pro at $19/month per member. Enterprise pricing available.

Best for

Static sites, JAMstack apps, and marketing pages. If your backend lives elsewhere and you just need fast frontend deployment, Netlify is solid.

Limitations

No managed databases. No background workers. No cron jobs. No WebSockets. No long-running functions (26-second timeout on Pro). This is a frontend platform. Calling it a "Vercel alternative for full-stack" would be inaccurate.

#Coolify

Open-source, self-hosted PaaS. Free forever.

Coolify is an open-source alternative to Vercel, Heroku, and Netlify that you host on your own servers. Over 50,000 GitHub stars. Deploy static sites, APIs, databases, and 280+ one-click services — on any server with SSH access.

If you want complete control and zero platform fees, Coolify is the answer. VPS, bare metal, Raspberry Pi — it doesn't matter. If it runs Linux and accepts SSH, Coolify can deploy to it.

Key features

• Open source (MIT license)
• Self-hosted on any Linux server
• Git integration (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket)
• One-click databases and services (280+)
• Automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt
• Docker and Docker Compose support
• Notifications (Discord, Telegram, email)

Pricing

Free. Open source. You pay for your own servers and nothing else.

Best for

Developers who want full control. Teams with existing servers or VPS. Budget-conscious projects where platform fees are a concern. Anyone who values open-source infrastructure.

Limitations

You manage everything: server maintenance, security patches, backups, uptime monitoring. No managed databases — you deploy them yourself. No autoscaling. The DX is good but not as polished as Railway or Render. Requires Linux administration knowledge.

#Porter

BYOC via Kubernetes. Deploy to your own AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Porter gives you a Heroku-like experience on top of Kubernetes in your own cloud account. It provisions and manages a K8s cluster in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, then gives you a dashboard to deploy and manage applications.

If you want BYOC with Kubernetes under the hood — and you're comfortable with the cost — Porter delivers.

Key features

• Deploys to your own AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Managed Kubernetes cluster provisioning
• Web services, workers, cron jobs
• Managed databases (Postgres, Redis)
• Preview environments from PRs
• Helm-based deployments under the hood
• SOC 2 compliant

Pricing

Starts around $225-300/month (platform fee plus default AWS infrastructure). Startup program available with 25 vCPU and 50GB RAM free for six months.

Best for

Teams that want Kubernetes power with BYOC, but don't want to manage K8s themselves. Mid-size companies with cloud credits. Teams that need compliance certifications.

Limitations

Expensive minimum — $225+/month before your actual workloads. Kubernetes complexity leaks through at scale. Some teams have reported challenges optimizing cloud credits through Porter's infrastructure setup. Not practical for small projects or prototypes. See our BYOC platform comparison for more.

#Cloudflare Pages + Workers

Edge-first platform with growing full-stack capabilities.

Cloudflare has been quietly building a full-stack platform. Pages handles static sites and SSR. Workers handle server-side logic at the edge. D1 provides serverless SQLite databases. R2 gives you S3-compatible object storage. KV and Durable Objects round out the data layer.

The ecosystem is growing fast, but it's a Cloudflare ecosystem. You're building on Cloudflare's primitives, and everything runs on Cloudflare's network.

Key features

• Edge compute in 300+ locations
• D1 serverless SQLite databases
• R2 object storage (S3-compatible, no egress fees)
• KV and Durable Objects for state
• Cron triggers for scheduled tasks
• Pages + Workers convergence (unified platform)
• Generous free tier

Pricing

Free tier: 100K Worker requests/day, 5M D1 reads/day, 10GB R2 storage. Paid: $5/month for Workers Paid (10M requests included). D1 and R2 scale with usage. No bandwidth fees on R2.

Best for

Edge-first applications. APIs that need to be fast globally. Projects that benefit from no-egress-fee storage. Teams already in the Cloudflare ecosystem.

Limitations

Locked to the Cloudflare platform — no BYOC, no standard containers. Workers have execution limits (30s on paid). D1 is SQLite-based, not Postgres. No traditional background workers or long-running processes. The programming model is different from standard Node.js. Migrating away means rewriting, not redeploying.

#DigitalOcean App Platform

Simple, cheap, full-stack PaaS.

DigitalOcean App Platform is what happens when a solid IaaS company builds a PaaS layer. Deploy from Git or Docker, add managed databases, set up scheduled jobs, and pay predictable monthly rates.

It's not flashy. It doesn't have Railway's visual canvas or Fly.io's edge network. But it works, it's cheap, and it's backed by DigitalOcean's infrastructure.

Key features

• Deploy from Git or container images
• Web services with autoscaling
• Background workers and scheduled jobs
• Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB
• VPC integration
• Custom domains and automatic HTTPS
• Built-in DDoS protection

Pricing

Free tier for static sites. Services start at $5/month. Databases start at $7/month. Billed by the second. Simple, flat pricing per service size.

Best for

Budget-conscious teams that need a full-stack PaaS without enterprise pricing. Side projects that need more than Vercel offers. Teams already on DigitalOcean infrastructure.

Limitations

No BYOC (you're on DigitalOcean's cloud). Limited to 8 regions. Autoscaling exists but is basic. Not the best DX compared to Railway or Render. Less community momentum than newer platforms. Slower feature velocity.

#Full-stack Vercel alternatives compared

All pricing and feature data verified as of February 2026.

#How to choose

The right platform depends on your constraints, not your preferences.

You need BYOC

If compliance, data residency, or cloud credits drive your infrastructure decisions, your options are AZIN, Porter, or Coolify (self-hosted). AZIN offers the best DX of the three. Porter gives you Kubernetes. Coolify is free but requires server management.

You want the best DX

Railway has the most polished developer experience for full-stack apps. Visual canvas, real-time cost tracking, one-click databases. If you don't need BYOC, it's hard to beat.

You're budget-constrained

Coolify is free. DigitalOcean App Platform is cheap. Cloudflare has the most generous free tier for edge workloads. Render and Railway both have reasonable entry points.

You need global edge

Fly.io (18 regions) and Cloudflare Workers (300+ edge locations) are the clear winners. Fly gives you full VMs. Cloudflare gives you edge functions with growing data primitives.

You need WebSockets or long-running processes

Fly.io handles this natively. Railway and Render support it through background workers. AZIN supports it through standard web services on your own cloud. Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Workers do not support persistent connections.

#Frequently asked questions

Vercel is excellent at what it does: deploy Next.js frontends. If that's all you need, use Vercel. But most production applications are more than a frontend.

For full-stack apps — with backends, workers, databases, and cron jobs — the platforms on this list are better suited. And if you want full-stack deployment on your own cloud infrastructure, without giving up developer experience, that's exactly what AZIN is built for.