vinext: Cloudflare vs Vercel, again
Recently, Cloudflare and people affiliated with Cloudflare posts a series of posts claiming that they have liberated Next.js and by vibe-coding a new solution (or a problem?) to host Next.js apps on their platform. And that Next.js won't have vendor lock-in anymore. They named the rebuilt vinext which is basically claimed to be a Vite plugin that reimplements the Next.js API surface so that you can deploy Next.js apps anywhere.
The post gains lots of traction on socials with millions of views, so Vercel had to come in, and they did.
Next, I see Vercel's Guillermo Rauch engaging in lots of related discussions and even posted a guide on how to migrate from Cloudflare to Vercel. And from here it only got intense, when he posted about multiple critical and high vulnerabilities in Cloudflare's vinext.
It's still going on but I am not keeping a track of it anymore, and here's what I think about this.
I don't think Next.js has vendor lock-in because I have hosted multiple Next.js sites on Netlify and even on a VPS via Coolify and Dokploy. In fact, I am still hosting multiple sites like that and everything just seems to work as expected.
But I also like Cloudflare a lot and I use Workers for a lot of things as well, for example, I recently started using their Analytics Engine for showing analytics data to my new app SharePDF users. It was quick to set up, and it just works.
I think, both platforms are great in their own way and there is no point in fighting like this. But... I also think that controversies like this are beneficial for both of them, from marketing point of view.
Also, I am not using vinext. At least, for now.
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