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If it's a static site then not very much I think. Since I used both I think the features are more or less same.But firebase don't have any bandwidth limitation I think.
Are you comparing Netlify to Firebase or comparing Netlify to a traditional web hosting provider? My question more pertains to the latter.
Static website?
The major difference is likely that Netlify will be free and more stable
Although Google Firebase is a whole other thing though
How is Firebase any different?
Cloudflare Pages and GitLab Pages are equivalent to Netlify?
Pros:
Cons:
When comparing to Netlify and/or Cloudflare Pages, Firebase Hosting should be used instead of Firebase, I guess.
Yes, roughly
I haven’t worked too much with Firebase (edit: I haven’t worked with it at all), but I’ve used Supabase & PocketBase and I’ve always thought of Firebase as an alternative to those, when I quickly visted it, it refered to itself as a way to host static and dynamic content
It’s probably a whole ecosystem of stuff
Don't know much about Firebase but can still offer some insight.
If by "traditional" webhosting you mean "shared/business web hosting" where you fill out a payment form and get access to cPanel, etc. then the biggest differences will be:
Speed: As others have mentioned, Netlify operates a static hosting service they've optimized to work for static websites and only static websites with few exceptions. This enables them to serve sites quickly with no need for the developer to optimize the backend. With any other hosting provider you have to do all of that, not to mention shared hosting environments often overburden their servers by allowing hundereds of people to run unoptimized software all on the same machine.
Security: Since static sites don't have a backend they interface with directly, there's a substantially reduced attack surface. On shared hosting you have to not only secure your website, but also the backend.
Abstraction: Netlify offers some flexibility to perform backend-oriented tasks by supporting Lambda/Serverless/Edge functions as well as runtimes like NextJS. For the most part, this means that you give up the ability to configure your server setup as you see fit and focus on building websites.
Asking this question is kind of like asking whether driving manual or automatic transmission is "better". Ask yourself what you're building, how you're going to build it, and who you'll be building it for and then decide whether you want to have more control, and with it more to maintain, or whether you want less control, but less to worry about. If it's the latter, go with a static host like Netlify, Cloudflare, Vercel, Render.com, etc.
Personally, I use both Netlify and my own VPS for hosting depending on the project.
It seems apparent from your detailed descriptions (and thank you for that) that for a static website, Netlify/Cloudflare Pages/GitHub Pages has virtually all the advantages over traditional shared/VPS/dedicated web hosting. Sure, you give up some control over the finer settings with Netlify, but what could you conceivably do better even with greater granular controls than what Netlify automatically does already, when it is regarding a static website?
Rephrasing your question to make sure I understand. You're asking "When hosting static sites can I get even better performance than Netlify from someone else?"
In short, if you're only hosting static sites, probably not, and definitely not for free.
Longer answer, maybe? But it's a game of diminishing returns and probably not worth trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of a shared hosting setup. If you're comparing platforms such as Netlify to shared hosting providers, it's hard to beat what Netlify does, especially when they do it for free. Cloudflare Pages has an even better deal because they offer everything Netlify has AND they also have unlimited bandwidth for free. There are some subtle differences between those 2 platforms and others in this space, but that's beyond the realm of a VPS hosting forum. You'd have to look into the product docs to compare them and see which works best for you.
cloudflare pages wins as the static pages are served from their local datacenter closest to your visitor. It's auto-caching just like Workers which also run from local center. With Pages you don't require another caching layer or CDN. It's alread ON and in use.
I've also used Netlify, quite similar to Github.
All 3 better than serving static files from traditional shared hosting.