Patr vs Vercel — A Comparison

Did you know that the DevOps transformation journey is still challenging for more than 50% of organizations? Despite high levels of automation, most firms get stuck at a mid-staged evolution and don’t end up optimising their infrastructural workflow to its fullest potential.

But what stops them?

While a plethora of platforms exist in the market, more often than not it becomes difficult for firms to single down one which provides them with ease, and efficiency and is economical at the same time.

Today, we’re going to compare two PaaS platforms that are available in the market, weigh their features and decide on which might be a better choice for you or your organization. The two platforms under contention are Patr and Vercel.

Vercel is one of the leading platforms for front-end frameworks and static sites, built to integrate with headless content, commerce, or database.

PATR is a simple, easy-to-use, and intuitive platform that will help you deploy Static Sites, Web Apps, APIs and any docker container super easily. It was built on the premise of helping developers and businesses scale seamlessly while avoiding large and unpredictable bills. It was conceptualised with the core vision of what a PaaS (Platform as a Service) should be all about.

So let’s get down to deciding which could be a better choice in terms of features and flexibility.

Infrastructure

• While Patr allows for responses to take as long as required for HTTP requests, Vercel has a hard response timeout of 10 seconds on the free plan, with a maximum of 900 seconds[1] in the enterprise plan, which can cost upwards of thousands of dollars per month.
• Even though Vercel allows you to automatically build your code from any GitHub repository, the build process is more suitable for deployments rather than continuous integration efforts. It builds the code to deploy on their servers and that’s pretty much it. Patr, on the other hand, offers a more general-purpose CI/CD solution that is entirely based on docker images, and can be customized to any general-purpose pipeline, including not using Patr to deploy at all!
• Vercel’s static site generator is great and works with a lot of existing tooling. However, the entire build process revolves around Node and the detected pipeline that Vercel believes your code to be based around. In case your project uses an unsupported tool (such as a new framework, WASM, etc), the build process becomes significantly more complex, making it extremely difficult to work with. When it comes to Patr since the CI tools are built around docker images, you are free to build any kind of application on Patr: if it runs in a container, it runs on Patr.
• Patr’s deployments and databases have a built-in IP access control as an additional layer of security. You also get free, unlimited DDoS protection from industry leader Cloudflare, at no additional cost to you!
• Managed URLs are a feature that we believe is essential when it comes to managing your redirects and proxies. While Vercel provides Redirects and Rewrites, these are usually meant for URLs that your websites run on; in comparison Patr’s Managed URLs work with any arbitrary URL that you may provide, for any subdomain on your host. For example, blog.yourdomain.com can be redirected to your medium blog, even though you don’t have any website running on Patr for that domain). The best part? Managed URLs are completely free of cost! You have full flexibility in terms of what you can do with Managed URLs without ever worrying about the costs.

Team Management

• The free plan of Vercel only allows you to have one member in your team, and any additional member is charged. Patr, on the other hand, allows you to add more members for no additional cost.
• Vercel also places a limit on the number of users that can be added to your team with a maximum of ten, post which you will be prompted to upgrade to custom pricing with an enterprise plan. Patr allows you to add as many members as you require to your account, at no additional cost.
• Vercel allows you to add members to your team for paid plans, it does restrict the access to finer permission models unless you’re ready to spend thousands of dollars for an enterprise plan. Patr, in contrast, gives you a fully-featured Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for any account, regardless of the size.

CI/CD, Bandwidth

• The bandwidth limit on Vercel projects is capped at 100GB/month. Patr uses a deployment algorithm that automatically schedules your deployments on the cloud provider with the lowest bandwidth bill, allowing you to avail of almost unlimited transfer. When one starts to build applications, it’s a hassle to worry about transfer and bandwidth pricing. If only bandwidth could be free and limitless!
  While that seems like a utopian aim, Patr does offer a bandwidth limit of 1TB per deployment per month, which, for most cases, would never exhaust. So it’s as good as free right?!
• Vercel sets a hard limit of 45 mins for each build, while with Patr, we set no such limit on your CI pipeline. Your CI pipeline can run for as long as it needs to. If you think a CI pipeline should not take too long, you can choose to set a timeout, which will automatically cancel the build if it takes longer than what you choose, but Patr does not restrict that timeout in any way.

Missing features

• While Vercel is great for frontend development, it lacks the tools required to build great backends. It only allows you to build serverless backends, and those serverless systems are restricted to certain languages that they support. Patr, on the other hand, allows you to run any docker image as a container. If your code has a Dockerfile in it, we will automatically detect it and run that. If not, you can choose to set up your own docker image and push your custom image, which will then run as a deployment. The possibilities are endless!
• Since Vercel is focused on front-end development, it does not offer any kind of database support, and in fact, directs users to external services for databases[2]. This makes it extremely difficult to manage multiple moving parts within the same application. It also makes it difficult to manage your RBAC settings for databases, requiring you to manually keep track of who has access to what in which application. With Patr, however, you can create and manage your databases all in one application, allowing you to choose who gets access to which part of your infrastructure, with our granular and powerful RBAC settings.
• Patr offers native support for Docker with multi-stage layer caching. All you need is a Dockerfile in your Git repository, and Patr automatically builds the Docker image and deploys it on every push. You can even customize which branch builds to which environment.
• Patr offers fully automated and completely free TLS certificates for custom domains, including wildcard domains.
• Lastly in Patr, Customer Support is also a huge motivator! Anytime something goes wrong, you have a chat box right on your screen with a direct line of communication with the team who built the product!

In conclusion, both Vercel and Patr offer a multitude of features, but if you’re a person who’s looking for simplicity with a sense of seamlessness and streamlined operation Patr should definitely be your go-to option.

Get started today, on https://app.patr.cloud. Happy deploying!