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Netlify platform overview

Use Netlify’s composable platform to build high-performing sites, apps, and stores with modular components that load near instantly for every visitor.

Our platform is designed to scale with you at every step, offer the best web experiences, and optimize for developer productivity. Netlify also offers improved productivity to cross-functional release partners, including content authors, marketers, and docs teams.

# What is Netlify?

Netlify is a composable platform that empowers enterprises and cross-functional teams to build high-performing modern web experiences that can scale, innovate, and ship to production faster.

Netlify’s composable platform is made up of 3 central products that you can use independently of each other and extend.

Netlify Platform showing 3 central products: Netlify Create, a visual editor, Netlify Core, the frontend cloud where you build, deploy, and run your site, and Netlify Connect, which unifies your data sources, such as for content

  • Netlify Create: enables real-time editing and publishing from a preview site in visual context. Developers can extend the visual editing experience with fully customizable site components using any tech stack or content source. Also called a visual editor.

  • Netlify Core: build, deploy, and manage your site/app on our global CDN and Netlify Edge network. Also called the frontend cloud.

  • Netlify Connect: integrate content from multiple sources into a single data unification layer that is cached at the network edge and is easily accessible through a GraphQL API. Sync data from legacy systems alongside a modern CMS.

# Netlify Create

Netlify Create offers a visual editor that lets you view your changes as you edit in real-time in a site preview. The visual editor allows marketers and content authors to quickly make site changes and drive business impact faster without waiting for engineering.

Content authors can use the visual editor to:

  • build landing pages
  • build templates
  • edit localized content with a live preview
  • edit versioned content with a live preview
  • create and maintain forms
  • manage SEO metadata
  • publish site changes
  • stage site changes for later publishing
  • collaborate on-site changes with others with real-time editing

Netlify Create also allows developers to customize the visual editing experience with any tech stack and content sources for the site. This allows content authors to edit all of your site’s content with the visual editor, even if the content is originally stored in different CMS silos.

In addition, developers can customize the frontend components that content authors can add and move on the site. Developers can also define editing limits to maintain branding or simplify the editing experience for content authors.

Learn more about Netlify Create.

# Netlify Core

On Netlify Core, you can build, deploy, and run your site/app on our global CDN and Netlify Edge Network.

Netlify Core can be understood as a frontend cloud but also offers much more and includes these key benefits:

  • scalability
  • faster production releases
  • better performance
  • incremental migrations that unlock value earlier
  • advanced cache control, Edge Functions, background functions, serverless functions, and more

Learn more about Netlify Core.

# Netlify Connect

Netlify Connect allows you to sync and combine data from multiple data sources into a single real-time graph database that you can query against with a GraphQL API.

Unify your content sources through Netlify Connect for the following benefits:

  • move to a composable architecture faster
  • sync data from legacy systems alongside a modern CMS
  • simplify content management
  • create a universal schema for your content
  • benefit from a single data unification layer that is cached at the network edge and is optimized for global availability, reliability, and performance
  • create private custom integrations that allow you to use data from your proprietary systems
  • access multiple data revisions cached for each data layer that capture the GraphQL schema and data at a point in time, with the ability to pin a specific revision for your API to use while planning for a major release or troubleshooting an error

Learn more about Netlify Connect.

# Composable web architecture

Netlify’s composable platform supports efficiency and cost-savings, from how you build, run, and deploy your site on our global CDN, to how you source and manage your site’s content and feedback cycles.

The Netlify platform uses a composable web architecture, so developers can:

  • choose the best tool for the job and swap tools freely
  • ship and iterate faster
  • build with the future in mind using site architecture designed to adapt to changing frameworks and integrations
  • boost their productivity and let marketers, copywriters, and other content authors manage site content, forms, SEO, and custom site components

# Extend the Netlify platform

Netlify partners with the best modern tools so that you can entrust different parts of your site to the right domain experts. For example, easily integrate your site or app with a trusted monitoring provider.

You can also partner with Netlify as an integration provider to make your integration available to the wider composable web ecosystem.

Finally, you can use the Netlify SDK to manage an incremental migration or develop custom solutions for your existing workflows and legacy systems.

# Use cases for cross-functional roles

The Netlify composable platform goes beyond developer productivity and is designed for the needs of architects, developers, cross-functional release partners, content authors, copywriters, marketers, and documentation teams.

Enterprises trust Netlify to help them ship to production faster, securely manage different site versions, and help content authors drive results faster with a custom visual site editor.

Modern web project lifecycle example featuring develop, build, deploy & run, and review & collaborate actions

# For Architects

  • Trusted yet modern approach used by many sites, apps, and stores
  • Migrate incrementally to a composable architecture while gaining early value
    • Make migrations more low-risk with custom solutions built with the Netlify SDK to transition from a legacy monolith to more modern tooling in phased stages
    • Get support from our top-notch Solutions Engineering team as you plan and execute your tech stack migration
  • Simplify compliance with our Firewall Traffic Rules to block or allow traffic from specific IP addresses or countries
  • Customize rate limit rules for sites and protect all sites with a rate limiting team policy
  • Manage security needs with different ways to secure access to your production and preview sites
  • Build with flexibility
  • Store and retrieve unstructured data with Netlify Blobs
  • Use the best components for different aspects of your business instead of compromising quality and efficiency to conform to a one-size-fits-all solution
  • Optimize for reliability and speed

# For Developers

  • Ship to production faster
  • Improve site performance and reliability
  • Build the best experiences with Edge Functions, Background Functions, serverless functions, and cache control
  • Optimize and transform images without impacting build times
  • Fix failed deploys and build errors faster with Netlify’s AI-enabled suggested solutions for build/deploy failures
  • Use modern frameworks more (or exclusively)
  • Swap integrations and other services as needed so you can pick the best tool for the job
  • Understand site performance for every deploy with build monitoring, site analytics, Real User Metrics, and Lighthouse scores
  • Set up a log drain for your site, app, or store so you can use advanced monitoring tools
  • Send custom notifications for Netlify activity to webhooks, email, or the Netlify App for Slack
  • Give content authors a way to edit and manage content on their own
  • Avoid engineering restrictions due to content silos
  • Debug your sites faster with the Netlify Drawer’s debugging tools
  • Focus on building innovative web experiences and creating differentiated value

# For cross-functional release partners

  • Give feedback on preview sites with a visual feedback “toolbox” called the Netlify Drawer
  • From a preview site, open issues in different issue-tracking tools, such as Linear, GitHub, Trello, and more. For example, request Design help in a new card in Trello and request QA testing help in a new issue in Linear.
  • Stay updated on feedback on a preview site and send feedback notifications to a Slack workspace with our Netlify App for Slack

# For content authors, copywriters, marketers

  • Ship campaigns and drive business impact faster
  • No-code content editing and publishing in real-time
  • Build landing pages
  • Create templates for content
  • Add pages, move and adjust site components that your frontend team fully customizes
  • Manage SEO metadata
  • Add and manage forms
  • Run experiments
  • Streamline content maintenance without CMS limitations, such as for localization or different site versions

# For documentation teams

  • Use docs-as-code with your preferred Git hosting provider, such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, or Azure
  • Review site changes from a pull/merge request in a Deploy Preview
  • Manage different versions of your site with branch deploys and custom subdomains using Netlify DNS
  • Delegate just your docs site to Netlify DNS without delegating the apex domain (docs.example.com without delegating example.com)
  • Manage redirects with Netlify redirects support
  • Publish changes without delays and coordinate overlapping docs site changes with site deploy management
  • Optimize docs engineering time

# More resources

Learn more about Netlify’s composable platform: