DEDenzel·Aug 17, 2016
At first I didn't understand the difference between Netlify vs. Jekyll / Hugo + s3_website [1] + S3/CloudFront + git. Admittedly, (1) the OP does a terrible job differentiating the two, and (2) there's significant overlap. Netlify is built for "dynamic" static websites, or rather JavaScript applications (whether they be single-page or not, it doesn't matter). It serves up a static page, and the JS and APIs do the rest.
So, for anyone who wants a basic breakdown between Netlify's features, and Jekyll + s3_website + S3/CloudFront + git/GitHub, here's the list of things BOTH support:
- Continuous Deployment
- Custom Domains / Domain Redirects / Domain Aliases
- Domain Redirects
- SSL (letsencrypt-s3front helps here [2])
- Redirects / Reverse Proxying (s3_website helps here with x-amz-redirect-location header [3])
- Headers / Custom Headers /
Read the rest
Basic Auth
- Versioning and Rollbacks (handled with git)
Here's the list of things ONLY Netlify supports:
- GeoIP / language-based redirects (on their Enterprise Plan for $1,000/month)
- Form submissions [4]
- Analytics snippet injection [5] (albeit a little unnecessary for most developers)
- Atomic deploys [6]
- Prerending [7] (one of the most important and useful features)
Please, correct anything that's wrong.
Netlify's killer feature, for me, looks like prerending: rendering JS pages with a headless browser to help with SEO, with no work on the developer's end, is awesome! However, Netlify strikes me as far too expensive at $9/$49/$399/$1k per month. Especially with developers as their target market. That's too much for what little extra features it does offer.
Here's to hoping they can continue to differentiate themselves more.
[1]: https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website
[2]: https://github.com/dlapiduz/letsencrypt-s3front
[3]: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-r...
[4]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling
[5]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/inject-analytics-snippets
[6]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/versioning-and-rollbacks
[7]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering
EDIT: formatting