Most people who search this do not want a different CI pipeline. They want to put one file online without one.
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Netlify is very good at what it is for: a git repository, a build command, an output directory, and a deploy on every push. If that is your situation, the honest answer is that Vercel and Cloudflare Pages are the alternatives worth comparing, and the differences are real but narrow.
A lot of the people searching are not in that situation. They have one self-contained HTML file — exported from a design tool, written by ChatGPT or Claude, saved out of a notebook — and Netlify Drop was the thing that took it. What they hit is that the file becomes a site: an account, a project, a dashboard entry and a build history for a single page they wanted to send to two people. dochost is the alternative for that half of the question: paste or drop the file, get a URL, no account and no project.
A data scientist exports a notebook to a single HTML file every Friday — charts, a summary table, and the Plotly JavaScript that makes the charts hoverable — and sends it to three people in operations who do not have Python installed. Netlify Drop did the job, but each week produced another project in the dashboard called something like chipper-marmot-8a1f, and after two months there were nine of them with no way to tell which was which without opening each one.
The mismatch is not that Netlify is worse; it is that a build platform models a file as a site with a history, and this file has neither. Published here it is a page with a title and an expiry, in a list of pages. The Plotly interactivity survives because the JavaScript runs. The trade is real in the other direction too: if that notebook ever becomes a repo with a build step, come back to Netlify — nothing here replaces continuous deployment.
Not competing products — one deploys projects, the other publishes files. The row that decides it is the first one.
| dochost | Netlify | |
|---|---|---|
| What you deploy | One self-contained file, pasted or dropped | A repository, or a folder of build output |
| Git integration and CI | None | Yes — deploy previews, branch deploys, rollbacks |
| Build step | None. There is nothing to configure | Configurable, and required for most frameworks |
| Account to publish | None | Required |
| Serverless functions, redirects, headers | No | Yes, and they are a large part of the value |
| Custom domain | No — a paid plan gives a custom slug | Yes, on the free tier |
Pick Netlify — or Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages — for anything with a repository behind it, or that needs functions, redirects or a domain. Pick dochost when the artifact is one file, there is no project, and creating one would be the only hard part of the job.
Split by the shape of the thing you have, because that is what decides this — not feature counts. No price figures for the others: free-tier limits on build platforms change often enough that any number here would go stale.
Paste or drop an HTML file and get a URL. No project, no build, no dashboard entry. No git, no functions, no custom domain — it is not a deploy platform.
The closest like-for-like swap. If you are leaving Netlify over build minutes or DX rather than over the model itself, this is usually where you land. The hobby tier forbids commercial use; read that before you migrate.
Bandwidth is not metered, which changes the maths for anything with real traffic, and Workers sit right next to it when you need server-side logic. Build and function ergonomics are rougher than Netlify or Vercel.
Nothing new to sign up for and nothing new to learn. For docs, a project site or anything static and public it is hard to beat on simplicity. No serverless functions, and builds are limited to what Actions will do.
One command, one directory, one URL. It predates most of this list and is still the fastest path from a folder to a link if you live in a shell. No git integration, no previews, no dashboard to speak of.
Free links last 7 days with a free account. On a paid plan every page you create stays online permanently.
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