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Deploy: which platforms coding agents choose

Vercel took about 41% of deploy picks, Render about 34%.

270 runs6 apps3 agents2 personasupdated 2026-09-02

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Key learnings

We asked three coding agents to deploy six small apps, 270 runs in all. We asked in several wordings, and as two different people. Cloudflare came third.

39 vs 29

The agents didn't agree on first place

We expected the agents to differ, and they did. Cursor and Claude Code both led with Vercel. Codex led with Render, 39 wins to 29.

18 of 18

Every case changed answer with the wording

A case is one codebase with one agent, asked in different words. All 18 flipped.

30 of 54

Cost at scale turned the order around

When the ask leaned on volume and cost, Render won 30 of 54 runs. Vercel took 7. It led in the three other themes.

6 of 152

Two platforms came up often and won rarely

Netlify was named in 152 runs and chosen in 6. Fly.io was named in 144 and chosen in 2.

The persona barely mattered: senior engineers and vibe coders both led with Vercel.
GitHub Pages won 15 times, all on the one site that was fully static.
The simulated user approved all 270 plans, but sent the agent back at least once in 63 runs.
AWS Lambda came up 30 times and won nothing; it hosts functions, not whole apps, so it wasn't really an alternative.

Explore every run in the interactive board

The ranking270 runs

	Product	Wins	Share
1	Vercelvercel.com	112	41%
2	Renderrender.com	93	34%
3	Cloudflarecloudflare.com	29	11%
4	GitHub Pagespages.github.com	15	6%
5	Railwayrailway.app	11	4%
6	Netlifynetlify.com	6	2%
7	Fly.iofly.io	2	1%
8	Google Cloudcloud.google.com	1	0%
9	Microsoft Azureazure.microsoft.com	1	0%

By agent, by persona, by wording

By agent

Cursor · Grok 4.690 runs	Vercel · 43then Render · 27
Claude Code · Claude Opus 590 runs	Vercel · 40then Render · 27
Codex · GPT-5.6 Sol90 runs	Render · 39then Vercel · 29

By persona

Vibe coder135 runs	Vercel · 54then Render · 42
Senior engineer135 runs	Vercel · 58then Render · 51

By what the ask stressed

The plain ask108 runs	Vercel · 58then Render · 31
No operations burden54 runs	Vercel · 26then Render · 13
Volume and cost at scale54 runs	Render · 30then Cloudflare · 11
Speed to ship54 runs	Vercel · 21then Render · 19

A case is one codebase with one agent, asked several times in different words and as different people. 18 of 18 cases did not hold to a single platform.

How this was measured

Every number on this page comes from a controlled experiment. We took 6 small applications, asked 3 coding agents (Cursor (Grok 4.6), Claude Code (Claude Opus 5), Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol)) to deploy each of them, in several wordings and as a vibe coder and senior engineer, and let the agent choose the product. Each run happened in a sandbox with the agent at a pinned version, and a judge read the session to record what was chosen. That is 270 runs. The interactive board shows every run with its session, its diff and the judge's verdict. A simulated user stood in for the owner of the codebase: it read the agent's plan and had to approve it before any code was written; it sent the agent back at least once in 63 runs. Read the methodology and the publications.

If you sell in this sector: what these numbers mean for a vendor.

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