Nexos vs Vercel: a full-stack alternative for preview environments

Vercel changed how we ship frontends. A git push, a live URL, no infrastructure to worry about. For a lot of teams, that is still the right choice.

But Vercel was designed for the Jamstack era: static assets, edge functions, a third-party API for everything stateful. If your app has a backend container, a real Postgres, a queue worker, or anything that needs to persist state between requests, you quickly start fighting the platform instead of using it.

What Vercel is great at

Next.js on Vercel is genuinely excellent. Global edge delivery, incremental static regeneration, image optimisation, and first-class framework integration. If you are shipping a marketing site or a lightly-interactive app with a cached REST/GraphQL backend somewhere else, Vercel will be the fastest thing to live.

Where Vercel stops scaling for preview workflows

Three specific pains push teams to look at alternatives:

• No real backend per preview. Preview URLs on Vercel share the same backend as production — or whatever Preview Environment Variables point them at. Every reviewer is testing against the same database. A destructive migration or a bad test write affects everyone.
• Serverless function limits. 10-second execution caps, cold starts, no long-running processes. Fine for most frontend workloads, painful for anything with a queue, a websocket, or a computationally heavy endpoint.
• Cost surprises at scale. The Pro plan starts at $20/seat/month and bandwidth / function invocations can blow past that quickly on a busy staging workflow.

How Nexos is different

Nexos gives every git branch its own full-stack preview: your Dockerfile runs as a real container, a dedicated Postgres spins up alongside it, Redis if you want it, and the URL goes live in under a minute. Subsequent pushes rebuild only your app container — the database survives every push, so test data persists until you choose to reset it.

Because Nexos runs your Dockerfile, you are not restricted to a specific framework. Ship Rails, Django, Go, Rust, Phoenix, or Next.js — the platform does not care.

When to pick which

Pick Vercel if your app is a Next.js frontend and everything stateful already lives in a separate managed service that does not care about branches.

Pick Nexos if every pull request needs its own running backend and its own database, if you want per-second billing with no idle charges when an environment is paused, or if you just want one preview tool that handles the whole stack.

Both can coexist, too — run your production frontend on Vercel, and use Nexos for backend preview environments. We will not try to steal your frontend.