Compare preview options

Compare preview options to choose the right preview for your workflow, stakeholders, and review needs.

Different deployments can offer different preview experiences and other options. There are also preview options that are not a deployment on Netlify that you may find helpful in certain cases or at certain points of your workflow.

Preview options

Preview option	Access	Starts from	Optimized for
Deploy Preview	Anyone with Preview URL unless you’re protecting deploys	Pull request, merge request, or agentic workflow	Previewing changes in a pull or merge request or from an AI deployment and sharing them
Branch deploy	Anyone with Preview URL unless you’re protecting deploys	Branch	Steady set of batched changes, such as for an early release
Local development	You	Terminal	Confirming code works for framework, solo development
Preview Server	Netlify team	Preview Server	Live content updates shared between developer & content stakeholders

Preview URLs

Preview option	Preview URL
Deploy Preview	https://deploy-preview-1234--my-site.netlify.app
Branch deploy	https://branch-1234--my-site.netlify.app
Local development	Depends on your framework. For example, an Astro site can be http://localhost:4321/.
Preview Server	https://devserver-branchname--my-site.netlify.app