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At first glance this looks very much like Firebase, minus the real-time datastore. What's different/better about Netlify, and how are you supposed to use it fo
by piotrkaminski 9y ago
At first glance this looks very much like Firebase, minus the real-time datastore. What's different/better about Netlify, and how are you supposed to use it for sites that need to persist data (i.e., pretty much anything non-trivial)?
- dguo 9y agoFirebase, from what I understand, includes a lot of backend products and features to help you develop mobile apps. Netlify is focused on the web frontend, which leads to both crucial and nice to have features for that specific context. For example, you can just drag a folder containing static assets into its interface and make a website out of it. Features off the top of my head: * SSL support (through Let's Encrypt), even with custom domains * A global CDN * Instant cache invalidation * Redeploy with one click * Roll back support * Custom build commands (whereas with GitHub Pages, you either have to use Jekyll or commit generated files) * An API * Preview websites for GitHub pull requests, so you can easily view changes in browser before merging For sites that persist data, you could still use Netlify to deliver the frontend and then use Ajax to talk to the backend.
- piotrkaminski 9y agoHmm, Firebase does all of the above except custom build commands and preview websites for PRs. And while they're certainly focusing their marketing on mobile apps these days, they actually have a pretty good value proposition for web apps as well. Sounds like Netlify is competing either on simplicity or on price, with a (likely temporary) advantage in developer tooling integration.