🚀 Deploying a personal project for the first time, Vercel or Netlify, which was smoother?

Finally finished a small personal project I have been slowly building over the past couple of months, a simple recipe organizer built with React on the frontend and a small Node backend, and now I am at the deployment stage, which is honestly a completely new experience for me since every previous smaller project I built just stayed running locally on my own machine without ever actually being deployed anywhere public before this one. Read through a decent number of comparisons between Vercel and Netlify specifically, and most of what I found online seems to lean toward Vercel for anything built with Next.js specifically, which makes sense given the obvious relationship there, but my own project uses plain React rather than Next.js, so I am not entirely sure that particular advantage actually applies as strongly to my specific case here. Netlify's own documentation looked slightly more approachable to me as someone deploying for the genuinely very first time, though I recognize that could easily just be a difference in how each company happens to write their onboarding pages rather than any real underlying difference in actual platform capability or ease of use once you are actually using either one regularly. My backend piece specifically also needs to run somewhere separately from wherever the frontend static files end up being hosted, and I am still trying to properly understand whether either platform actually handles that kind of backend and frontend split cleanly for a genuinely small personal project like mine, or whether I need a completely separate service just for the backend portion specifically regardless of which one I pick for the frontend. For anyone who has actually deployed a similarly small plain React and Node project themselves recently, which platform combination actually felt smoother for you as a first real deployment experience, and did you run into anything specifically confusing that was not clearly covered anywhere in either platform's own documentation pages?