Lumbox vs Vercel and Netlify: What EU Teams Should Know

Vercel and Netlify are excellent platforms. If data residency isn’t a constraint for you, this comparison isn’t for you — go use them, they’re polished and fast.

This post is for the teams that have hit the GDPR wall: the client that wants a DPA with EU-only processing, the enterprise RFP that asks about data residency, the audit that requires a paper trail showing data never leaves Europe.

The core issue with US platforms and EU data

Vercel is a US company. Netlify is a US company. This means they are subject to US federal law, including the CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to compel data disclosure without notifying the data subject or even the company’s customer.

Both platforms offer EU deployment regions. But an EU region operated by a US company is not EU-sovereign hosting. The legal jurisdiction follows the company, not the datacenter.

This distinction matters for:

• Healthcare data (processing under HIPAA outside the US has EU-specific requirements too)
• Financial data regulated under DORA or PSD2
• Any data subject to GDPR’s Chapter V transfer restrictions
• Public sector contracts that require EU-only processing

Feature comparison

	Lumbox	Vercel	Netlify
EU-only data residency	✓ Guaranteed	Regional (but US legal entity)	Regional (but US legal entity)
GDPR-native DPA	✓ Included	Available	Available
Open-source runtime	✓ Core is open	Closed	Closed
Free tier	✓	✓	✓
Preview deployments	✓	✓	✓
Custom domains + auto TLS	✓	✓	✓
Edge functions	✓ (EU nodes)	✓ (global)	✓ (global)
Build minutes (free)	500 / mo	6,000 / mo	300 / mo
Pricing (pro tier)	€19 / mo	$20 / mo	$19 / mo
Legal jurisdiction	France / EU	United States	United States

Where Vercel and Netlify are better

Ecosystem maturity. Vercel has years of investment in Next.js integration and a large community. If your stack is Next.js and your team knows Vercel, there’s a real switching cost.

Global edge network. If you need sub-100ms response times for users in Asia or the Americas, Lumbox’s EU-focused network isn’t the right choice for that traffic. We’re optimised for EU users.

Integrations. Vercel and Netlify have richer integration marketplaces. Lumbox integrates with the essentials, but the long tail of SaaS integrations isn’t there yet.

Team size and polish. Both have larger teams and more mature UIs. We’re early.

Where Lumbox wins

Legal clarity. When your legal team or client asks “who is the data processor and where is data stored?”, the answer with Lumbox is unambiguous: Tatancorp, France, EU infrastructure only.

Open-source trust. You can read the deployment runtime. That’s an audit artefact you can actually produce.

Price at scale. Our Pro plan at €19/month includes more build minutes and bandwidth than equivalent plans on both competitors for EU-based workloads where global CDN reach isn’t the primary need.

DPA included at all tiers. Data Processing Agreement is available to all customers, not just enterprise. This is unusual and matters for small businesses that need GDPR compliance from day one.

The migration question

If you’re already on Vercel or Netlify and everything is working, don’t migrate without a reason. The reason is usually one of:

1. A client or prospect has asked for EU data residency guarantees you can’t currently provide.
2. An internal audit has flagged the US-entity risk.
3. You’re building something new and want to start compliant.

For case 3 especially, Lumbox is designed to be the default choice: free to start, easy to deploy, and compliant by architecture.

Try it

Five minutes to deploy your first project:

npm install -g @lumbox/cli
lumbox login
lumbox deploy

Or sign up and use the dashboard →

Questions about a specific compliance requirement? Email hello@lumbox.eu.